I hadn’t been able to sync up my memories with Ainash and Erani in the previous timeline, meaning I wasn’t able to fully bring them in on what’d transpired just by transferring their memories back to them. I could’ve transferred them my own memories of the previous timeline, but it took a lot longer to give them my memories than it would to give their own back to them, and we were with Sylvie, complicating the process by forcing us to hide it from her.
In the end, I was able to discreetly touch Ainash’s hand and give her the prepackaged memories from the timeline before last, and settled for just recounting what I’d experienced over our mental link.
After that short delay, we were off, heading back in the direction we came. Or, three of us were off. The fourth stood confusedly in the road, looking at us as we marched away.
“Are you gonna tell me why we're leaving?” Sylvie called after us before jogging forward to catch up. “And why you decided to wait until after we’d been traveling for, like, two hours before doing so?”
“I have an ability that occasionally gives me semi-random information,” I said, recalling that this same explanation worked in the previous timeline. “It just now gave me some relevant info on the bounty.”
“And what’s the info?”
“The guy behind the missing people is in that direction. If we’re going over there, there’s gonna be a fight, one we’re not well-enough equipped to deal with right now. So we either need to collectively Level up, like, five times, or we need to get some more people.”
“Wait, so we know that it was a person behind the missing guards? Are they dead, or just captured? Why’d they get attacked in the first place? And what’s up with the dude behind it all? What’s his Class, Level, that sort of thing?”
“Uh, just give me a second. Gotta sort through the info, and stuff.”
I’d half said that just to get away from the barrage of questions, and half because I actually did need to sort through what I knew.Index, they were able to detect us somehow in the previous timeline. Jon walked to the guard outpost earlier than he should have, and then found our location almost instantly despite the fact we were hiding. How’d he do that?
“I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but they have a variety of Divination methods. What got you there was specifically an ability that lets them know the number of people in any given location. When you went to the guard outpost, Jon was nearby, and they saw that the number of people in the area had increased, so he went to check it out. That happened in both timelines—it was the reason he came each time. Only, the second time, once he got closer to the guard outpost, he realized that the number of people in the area was split between the outpost and the field nearby, so he went to go investigate the field, where you were. Of course, most of the stuff about his intentions is just speculation, but that’s what best lines up with the ability.”
Shit. So ambushing him won’t work unless we’re already in a densely populated area, enough that he wouldn’t notice the tiny shift in numbers, then?
“Pretty much.”
This guy fucking sucks.
I sighed, trying to think through my options. The walk back to town would take around two hours. If it took an hour to get some people together, then we went back to the guard outpost right after, we’d be fighting far into nighttime. And the darkness would not be our ally, with Jon’s people-detecting ability preventing us from using it to set up an ambush. Instead, he’d almost certainly be the one to get the drop on us.
So then, if we had to get more people on our side—I still wasn’t entirely sure what our strategy for that would be—then it would probably be best to just go back to town, sleep, and wait until tomorrow. The fight had only happened because we’d gone to seek him out, so there was a chance we would be able to just wait and do it later.
I tried to think through the consequences of leaving him be until tomorrow. Obviously, the big one was that, right now, we at least knew where he was. If we waited until tomorrow, we’d have no idea. But then, I also tried to figure out what would happen in this timeline without us there at the guard outpost to fight Jon. Ripley was there with Bon, Jannin, and Poppins, so if Jon walked in…before, he’d interrogated them, and then flooded the outpost to drown them all. Erani had been the one to bust the wall down, so then would they all die?
Wait, no, Ripley had only decided to wait and let Jon interrogate the border guards because we were there. When we’d first arrived and Ripley was alone with the guards, she’d attacked on sight. I assumed her strategy there was to just get in an early strike and then run off if it were Jon at the door. She only waited to ambush them because she thought we could help fight him off. So would she be able to escape successfully?
Or, wait, Jon had only gone to approach the guard outpost in the first place because we’d arrived and he saw our arrival on his people-detector thing. So, if we never went there, would he just leave them alone? Or was he going to approach eventually anyway, and only went there a little earlier than planned because of our arrival?
I fought the urge to groan and rub my face with my hands. Time travel was fucking complicated. Who knew.
I tried to just think of the worst-case scenario. As far as I knew, the worst possibility would be that Jon fights Ripley at the guard outpost and wins. In that case, there wouldn’t likely be any casualties, since it seemed like Bon, Jannin, and Poppins generally stayed out of things so they would hopefully be little risk of collateral damage, and Jon’s intention was to capture Ripley, not kill her, so even if she lost she’d just be in custody. At the end of the day, I wasn’t exactly responsible for her life, or anything, but I’d have liked to prevent the death of one of the few people who seemed to be my ally in all this.
So, if she got captured, then what? Jon needed to stick around, since he was here to capture her and kill me, so that would still leave me with an opportunity to break her out. And if my intention was to kill Jon anyway, then it wouldn’t be an issue to set her free anyway.
The only issue would be finding him. Except, he would probably set out to find me, so if I just…what, grabbed as many random adventurers as possible, said I knew where to find the missing guards for the bounty, promised them a cut if they helped me fight off their captor, Jon, and then walked out on the road and waited for him to come to me…that could work?
One of the biggest advantages of that plan was that it’d all happen tomorrow. Meaning, it would be a new day, and I’d get a full refill of my Time Loop uses. I was down to one final usage of the ability before I was vulnerable, and I’d have liked to avoid that as much as possible. So if I let today pass, got my free Stat from Recycled Loop converting my last unused activation of Time Loop, got three fresh uses, and then did the fight tomorrow, I’d be in the best shape I could be in to kill this guy.
Overall, it seemed like a good plan. I’d been relaying my abridged thoughts to Ainash so she and Erani could stay informed. At least, I assumed Ainash was sending everything to Erani; she was currently petting the beetle sitting on her shoulder, having run back to pick it up after I transferred her memories to her so she didn’t “leave it behind in the past.” Regardless, Ainash hadn’t sent me any objections from herself or Erani, so I assumed they agreed with the plan. Or, they didn’t know what I was talking about and just assumed it would work; they still only had a cursory knowledge of the most recent timeline since I still hadn’t had an opportunity to more than briefly summarize it.
“So…are you gonna answer any of those questions I asked five minutes ago, or…”
Looking over, I saw Sylvie walking along, looking at me expectantly. I cleared my throat. “Oh, right, yeah. Uh, basically…wait, what’d you ask again?”
Sylvie rolled her eyes. “I cannot believe you’re the one in charge of your group.”
“First off, I’m not technically the one in charge. I’m just the one who’s best at talking. Second, aren’t you the one who’s in charge of you and Entismo, as a pair? And you drink profusely at all of our meetings? And forget…most things?”
“Being a hypocrite is one of my core abilities as a leader,” Sylvie said proudly.
“I…can’t tell if you’re fucking with me or not,” I said.
“If I’m what-ing you?” Sylvie asked, eyes wide. Then she blinked. “Oh, right, right, I forgot you Koinkarians use the word ‘fuck’ to mean, like, everything, instead of just sex.”
“You thought I was asking if you were currently having sex with me? …I don’t think I’d have to ask. Also, my girlfriend is two paces to your left.”
She shrugged. “I’ve had people proposition me in weirder ways. Anyway, I’ll have you know that shameless hypocrisy is an important part of any decent leader. You have to be capable of telling other people to get their hands dirty, kill a monster, build a house, whatever, without actually being capable of doing it yourself. That’s the whole point of leading—getting people to do stuff you can’t do. So I think it shows how effective of a leader I am that I’m capable of pointing out your flaws of being a terrible conversationalist while I, too, am terrible at conversation.”
I sighed. I still didn’t know if she was fucking with me or not. “Well. Regardless, the news on the bounty is that we’re gonna just try it tomorrow after gathering together as big a team as possible. Effectively, to kill the guy behind the disappearances, we’re gonna need as much power as we can get a hold of, and it’ll be bad if we try to ambush him at night because of some of his abilities. And before you ask me for specifics, I don’t have many—the ability isn’t too specific in what information it gives me.”
“Wait, wait, we’re just gonna kill the guy?”
I blinked. “Well, yeah. What’s the problem?”
“Is he a wanted criminal? Or, like, is there no way to just capture him and turn him into the police? Because right now, I think you’re technically colluding with me to commit murder, if killing him is a foregone conclusion for no reason.”
“He’s just…It’ll be really, really hard to get past him without killing him. You know how Magic-Types are. Leave them alive, and they can cast a Spell to end you in an instant.”
“Still seems like going for the kill instantly would be a pretty great way to get arrested.”
“Fine. I’ll do my best to leave him alive,” I lied. “We’ll only kill him if it’s clearly a self-defense situation.”
“You seem pretty fine with murder, is all I’m saying.”
“Well, sometimes killing is necessary.”
She stared at me for a minute. “...So, how many people have you killed? You an assassin, or something?”
“What?”
“I mean, the way you’re talking, it’s obvious you’ve killed some folks.” She waved her hands in front of her face. “No issue with that, it’s all cool…but you can’t just allude to something super interesting like that and then not elaborate. So, what’s the number? What’s your coolest kill? Did you, like, work for a secret Koinkar government project, assassinating political rivals? Have you killed any famous people?”
“I feel like you intentionally push conversations to run away from their original topics sometimes.”
“Well I’ve found that I have to do that when someone is being all aloof with what they know about the job we’re currently doing,” Sylvie said, voice dripping with sass. “Do you want to at least tell me why you find it so necessary to bring in, as you said, ‘as big a team as possible,’ to help us kill some random dude? Is he really that strong?”
“Yes.”
“Strong enough to justify splitting our cuts that much? I’d like to actually make money from doing this, you know.”
“Are you gonna drop the job if we bring in too many people?”
Sylvie let out a half-sigh, half groan. “No, I guess not. I’m just too good of a person, it seems. Too dedicated to helping these poor victims of kidnapping, such a selfless soul.”
“Do you actually care about saving them? I thought you didn’t care about the border guards, since they all defected from Etrin and spread those rumors about him assassinating Lyra to take her spot as emperor?”
She frowned. “How do you know about that? Did Entismo tell you about one of our arguments, or something?”
“Uh…”
Oh, shit. Had that conversation happened in a previous timeline? I thought she’d told me…no, yeah, we were walking down the road on the way to the guard outpost when she told me about her resentment for them. It felt like that’d happened yesterday, or something. From my perspective, it’d been…what, eighteen hours ago that we talked about it? Fucking Time Loop, destroying my sense of when stuff actually happened.
“I just assumed,” I said, trying to come up with an excuse, “since you’re technically a noble, and all. I know a lot of the nobles feel that way about that whole political issue.”
“I mean, I’m not technically a noble, I’m literally a noble. I just don’t like being one.”
“I thought you ran away from home, or something. Does that not mess with your title and stuff?” I honestly had no idea how this all worked—I hadn’t known shit about nobility in Koinkar, much less in this foreign country.
“On paper, I’m actually on an ‘extended sabbatical’ right now.”
“Oh, huh. Well anyway, do you think the whole payment thing is gonna be a problem when it comes to finding more recruits? I would really like to get as many people together as possible.”
She gave me a look for a moment. “Doing this is important to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you obviously aren’t doing it for the money. You’re sitting here saying you’re willing to cut your reward down to basically nothing just to get it done. So I’m assuming there’s something personal going on?”
“...Yeah,” I conceded.
I waited for her to press for more info, ask me an avalanche of way-too-personal questions, something like that, but eventually she just said, “Well, if it’s important, then I can make sure money isn’t an issue.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I can personally provide some funds to make sure people don’t get pissy that the pot’s running out.”
“Are you sure? I mean, I’m really looking for a lot of people, so I don’t want to surprise you when I start approaching as many people as I can find to—”
“It won’t be an issue. I have the money.”
I looked at her. “You’re sure?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes. You just go and grab the people you want to add onto our party, and I’ll handle the finances.”
“Okay, so like…what’s the budget, then?”
“Well, I’d be okay with providing at most ten percent of my yearly investment allowance, assuming this is genuinely, actually important, so…Let’s see, I think I currently receive around fifteen million eyt a year from our estates, and then there’s the tavern chain in Westershire, which brings around another five, I believe…”
I blinked, suddenly finding it difficult to focus on Sylvie’s words after the absurd numbers she’d just thrown out.
“...So, in the end, I believe I could provide you three, maybe three and a half million from my income. Though, I would imagine you’d need a lot less than that?”
I was just staring at Sylvie. “Are you fucking with me?”