“Why should I help you? You are just going to kill me anyway,” the grandmaster said. He was being rather brave for someone who had been frozen in fear moments ago.

“No, I’m not,” Hugo said, “And I didn’t really kill them either.”

“They look pretty d..dead to me,” the grandmaster said.

Hugo noticed the stutter in his voice. The nox must be barely keeping it together. He solidified a chair within the cage and another for himself. He sat and said, “Have a seat, relax. I am sure you will understand after I explain. Grandmaster ... I am sorry, you never introduced yourself.”

“Langa, Grandmaster Langa,” he said as he sat down.

Hugo gave him a ritual greeting as if he was just meeting him and said, “Glad to meet you Grandmaster Langa.”

The nox gave him a strange look, Hugo ignored it and continued, “I have a long story to tell you. Trust me, this will all make sense in the end. Assuming you are reasonable, I will even let you go.” Hugo groaned as he sat down and said, “It all starts with an idiot named Alexandru and accidental time travel...”

...

“That’s ... quite the story,” the grandmaster said when Hugo was done.

“I can tell you don’t believe me. That’s fine. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t lived it. Luckily, I can prove something impossible is going on. I have five domains. You are sitting in a mana cage of my creation, that’s one.” Hugo fabricated a thin rectangle of titanium, “That’s two.” Then he fabricated a mithril rod and inscribed a fire rune in the corners. “That’s three.”

Next was ritual, and he wandered around the mountain top for a bit to find a mana stone. Luckily, one of the monsters killed on their arrival had dropped one. He brought it back and placed it on the ritual rectangle. With a flourish, he placed the mana stone on the metal and cut himself. One use of oblate later, and the ritual rectangle produced a gout of flame, high into the sky. “That’s four.”

He passed the guard’s dagger through the bars of the cage and said, “Give yourself a small cut so I can show you my life domain.”

“That’s fine, I trust you. You have already shown me the impossible,” the grandmaster said.

“No, no. I insist. I want you to know I have been telling you the full and absolute truth,” Hugo said and pushed the knife handle into one of his hands.

Langa reluctantly took the knife and gave himself a cut across his palm. He quietly gasped and held out his bleeding hand.

“You didn’t have to cut your palm, that hurts more than almost any other place,” Hugo said and pushed mend into his hand. A moment later it was healed.

Hugo backed up and recycled the mana in the cage holding the grandmaster. “Now that you know I am telling you the truth, I would like your help.”

Langa immediately backed up and looked around himself to ensure he was really free, “What do you want?”

“I am heading down the mountain soon, to blow up a shimmer substation and travel back in time, yet again. Since you are the pre-eminent authority on rituals, I was hoping that you could help me transfer the power from this ritual node, over to that ritual node,” Hugo said as he pointed.

Despite himself, the nox seemed interested in the question. He said, “Why do you want to move it over there?”

“That’s the node for my body. I just want to live my life in my own body again. This whole mess started because I was pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Can you help me?”

“Maybe. Maybe,” Grandmaster Langa said. Together they cleaned off Alexandru’s circle and the nox took his time to study everything.

After a half hour of study, Langa said, “I can’t believe this works. It’s using two different schema, the connectors are inverted, there is no overarching theme, half the runes are nonsense, it’s just nuts.”

“Yeah, I have discovered that Alexandru just got lucky. He doesn’t really know what he is doing and the time travel aspect was a complete accident,” Hugo said, “Do you think you can help me?”

“There are two major problems with your plan. First off, I don’t understand this section of the ritual here. I believe it handles pushing your soul into the correct container, but I am not sure. I have studied Acomarian rituals before, but never one that handled the souls. I would have no way of knowing how to redirect your soul,” Langa said.

“Actually, I might be able to help out with that. I have seen an Acomarian ritual that moves the soul. We could probably use it to fix the ritual,” Hugo said excitedly.

“That leads us to your next problem. You can’t redirect the power. The ritual is specifically designed to siphon off power and not return it to closed loops. You would have to return power to all eight nodes just to get your node to light up. That would require a massive amount of power,” the grandmaster said.

“That’s actually good. I want most of these people alive again. How much power is a massive amount?” Hugo said.

“A lot. More than I have ever seen used in a ritual. There is a reason this ritual uses the shimmer veins of the mountain as a power source, it would be impossible otherwise. If you wanted to reactivate all of the nodes you would need multiple mana cores. Eight to be safe.”

“Eight mana cores?” Hugo said, deflating.

Grandmaster Langa said, “Yes, eight full cores. Integrating the power wouldn’t be hard, but I don’t think there are even eight mana cores for sale on the whole wheel. Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Hugo sighed, “Well, thanks for looking anyway. I guess I am off to blow up a shimmer plant. How much time do I have anyway?”

“What do you mean?” the nox said.

“How long until those two nodes go dim?” Hugo said.

“I don’t know, I would need my tools from the airship,” Langa said.

Hugo escorted him to the airship and back to the ritual. He wasn’t ready to fully trust the nox yet. Grandmaster Langa grabbed his Anubis glasses and Acomarian gauge from the ship and started doing measurements.

“This node here is already waning, it will be gone in ten weeks. You won’t be able to travel back in time if the final node loses any power. So you will need to restart before then,” Grandmaster Langa said.

That’s about what Hugo had been expecting. It was actually good that things fell apart now instead of three months from now. By then it would have been too late.

“Alright, thanks. Let’s get back to the airship. Thanks for your help. Anything you want me to pass on to yourself from a month ago?”

“No, I don’t care about that guy. That won’t be me. I am the sum of my memories and when you travel back in time, you will effectively kill me,” Langa said.

Hugo tilted his head to the side as he thought about it, “I can see where you are coming from, but I really disagree. A month of memories doesn’t really make you a different person. Both of us have forgotten more than a month worth of memories.”

“Let’s talk about it in the air,” the grandmaster said, “Lead the way.”

Hugo nodded and started towards the airship. Ten weeks. He had ten weeks in this life. Was there anything he needed to do before he restarted?

Before he could think of anything, he heard a quiet bark. He looked to the left to see a velociraptor climbing up to the plateau. Great. These guys always came in packs. Hugo sighed and solidified his knight armor again.

It was the only thing that saved his life.

While his back was turned, Grandmaster Langa had disassembled the tools and used them in an attack ritual. A thick green light burst from the nox’s four hands and slammed into Hugo. The impact sent him flying across the plateau. Halfway through his flight, the damage was enough to disintegrate his mana armor.

The remaining power of the ritual was enough to burn him across his chest, right arm, and back. As he hit the ground, he heard something crunch. He tried to get up and jump out of the way. He immediately fell. His right leg was in agony and wouldn’t support his weight.

Redirecting his efforts into defense, Hugo made a trio of shields in front of himself. That would give him enough time to solidify more of them if they started breaking. Instincts from numerous hunts made him check behind himself for monsters. He couldn’t afford to have tunnel vision now.

The velociraptor from before was still in the same place, standing at the edge of the plateau. Hugo was immediately suspicious. He knew they hunted in packs and the only reason the one he could see wasn’t moving, was because there were other monsters he couldn’t see. He squinted and looked through the shields to see that the grandmaster had turned around and was running towards the airship.

Two velociraptors were racing after him. The nox turned to the left and threw a bit of dust at that monster. A spoken word turned that dust into a fireball that obliterated the monster. While that one was turning into motes of mana, the other velociraptor had jumped into the air. The grandmaster turned around just in time to get knocked to the ground.

As soon as Hugo saw the nox go down, he solidified a strong dome around himself. He couldn’t get up to fight right now. The monsters would be on their way soon. The grandmaster’s screams cut out moments after Hugo’s dome went up. He did his best to ignore the monsters prowling around him. He needed to be able to walk if he was going to survive. With a mental flex, he pushed his health points into his leg.

It was difficult. Most of his body was in pain. His right arm was broken, his whole torso was burned, and his leg was throbbing. He had to pull his health points from all over his body and concentrate them on his leg. It was the same one that he had just barely healed. Thankfully, it wasn’t broken. He wasn’t sure if his health points could heal broken bones quickly, no matter how many he had.

The next five minutes were taxing. There were five velociraptors prowling around the secondary ritual. He had to concentrate as they intermittently tested the strength of his dome. They weren’t trying too hard yet. There were several other bodies about to keep the monsters distracted. That wouldn’t last long.

Eventually, he had healed enough to stand up. Which was good because he was completely out of health points now. Carefully, he armed himself with a titanium spear and a pair of bombs. He couldn’t make more than two because of the limit on the number of barriers he could concentrate on at once. He kept an eye on the velociraptors and recycled his dome when they were all on one side.

He grabbed the spear and raced away from the pack. They heard him scrabble away and came after him. Hugo pumped his feet, not looking back. When he judged they had come far enough, he recycled the barrier around the bombs. Both explosions went off and Hugo spun to face the survivors.

To his delight, four of the five monsters were killed. One of them had been partially flesh, and the ground was painted red. Hugo dashed forward with his spear, trying to get the survivor while it was still disorientated. He wasn’t fast enough.

The remaining velociraptor slithered around the thrusting spear and came at Hugo. It stretched its mouth wide to snap down on his neck. A quick mana shield was enough to save him. He had anchored the shield to the monster’s mouth, so its jaw was stuck open.

While the velociraptor was focused on crushing the foreign object in its mouth, Hugo stepped back and stabbed it in the eye. Moments later, motes of mana were all that surrounded the spear. Hugo grunted and drug himself back to the airship.

He hadn’t ever piloted one, but he had seen it done a few times by this point. Hugo was able to get the airship in the air. A quick scan of the cloudless sky showed that there were no flying monsters around. He slowly started to relax.

Hugo slumped to the floor and swore loudly. Twenty four hours ago he had thought he had everything. Now he had nothing. He wasn’t depressed or anything, he just wasn’t looking forward to starting over again. It was frustrating that he had to do this yet again. Now he had a fifty/fifty chance of ending up as a woman. Ugh.

Maybe he was depressed.

He had one final life left and he didn’t have any say on which life it would be. He didn’t even know the names of the boy or girl he could jump into. He swore again.

Knowing that he was high in the air meant that he couldn’t really relax. He stood back up and slowly figured out the controls for the airship. He realized he couldn’t fly back to Tallinn. Returning to the airship dock alone would be way too suspicious.

Tembisa was calling his name. He wanted to have a few more days of relaxing before he resigned himself to his fate. Today had been traumatic. He was still healing as his health points regenerated and were sucked into his many injuries. He would probably have nightmares about killing his family and how the grandmaster died.

He shook his head. Focus on the fun. He hoped that Commissioner Binh would be at the Golden Lily. He was lots of fun to gamble with. Maybe Hugo could win the grain contract again if he played well enough. Not that he needed that golem ritual again. As much as he didn’t want to be a girl, he wanted to be a golem even less.

He spent a large portion of the flight thinking about his ideal body. It would be tall and handsome, a bit rugged. Too bad that even getting to his own body was out of his reach. Even with the correct ritual, he could never power it. The grandmaster had said he would need an impossible eight mana cores to even attempt it.

A sudden realization had him frantically racking his memory. How many mana cores did Lenna’s dad have? He knew it was either five or six of them. There was one more in a warehouse in Reval, bait for the Fox gang. In a few weeks there would be another in Ettel after they killed that serpent hydra.

He might have access to eight mana cores. He just had to steal them all.