ROTLE- Chapter 156- Déjà vu

A moment of silence settled on the group. Ted looked around, offering weak smiles to everyone. Aiden could see their worries on their face as well as Ted’s failed attempt to assuage said worries.

After the offering of weak smiles, Ted leaned into him conspiratorially and spoke in a whisper.

“Just déjà vu?” he asked quietly. “Or Déjà vu Déjà vu?”

Aiden was lost in his thoughts. Still, he heard his brother’s question.

“The other one,” he said, still thinking.

He didn’t know of any time mage in the area at this time that could have some kind of problem with him. Even with all the changes he had made, time mages weren’t just walking around looking for trouble.

Time magic worked in a specific type of way, and it wasn’t just cast randomly. A time mage cast time magic on a specific area, affecting a specific number of people. If you were powerful enough, like a [Sage] maybe, you could affect the weather within their area.

Those outside the range of the skill would not be affected.

Aiden looked up at the canopy of trees, then around. Were they already within the range of the skill? Was it some kind of channeled time magic where a zone was already set up?

He turned to Ted.

“Nothing?” he asked.

Ted stopped to think before shaking his head. “Nothing.”

He would have liked to write it off but when he had come back in time, Ted was the only one with the déjà vu, he had felt nothing.

Because you have your entire memory. What’s déjà vu to a full blown memory?

Another jepat strolled its way to join the conversation.

“Is everything alright?” Zen asked.

Aiden looked at him. “Have you seen anything?”

At this point, he was grasping at straws. If they had gotten into a fight in the future Zen was already under instructions that his skill [Borrowed Guest] had to always be the first thing he used. That way they were always warned ahead of an impending battle.

Zen shook his head immediately. “Nothing.”

Which meant that between now and whatever had happened, Aiden hadn’t seen the need to make Zen use the skill, and Zen hadn’t seen the need to use the skill.

He could make Zen use the skill now but that was where the problem with Zen’s skill lay. If he made Zen use the skill now, it would take a random iteration of his past and pull it forward. Thus, they would be granted no knowledge because they would already have the knowledge. If he used it a little bit in the future so that Zen possessed knowledge right now, they could end up getting into battle just after he used the skill.

Aiden ran his hand through his hair.

“That way.” He pointed forward, deeper into the forest. “We ride straight until the dark, then we make camp and keep watch.”

Everyone hesitated. They were worried now, watching him warily. But they were not wary of him. They were wary of his fear.

Pull yourself together, he chided himself. He knew from experience that it was very terrifying when the person in your group that was never worried became worried. It was infectious, slithering through the ranks like a venomous thing.

Slowly, everyone nudged their jepats forward. Feira hesitated, giving Aiden a worried look before finally following after her brother.

Elami lagged behind only for Ted to wave him off. Aiden did the same to Oncot.

Aiden and Ted followed last, creating enough distance between them and the group ahead. They moved in silence for a while, Ted giving him a moment to collect his thoughts before they were encased in a bubble.

The tricky thing about enchantments was that you didn’t always get a notification that you were within the effects of one unless it directly affected you or was applied upon you. Aiden’s previous manifesting skill used to take care of that for him. One of the things it helped with was telling him when he was within the range or effect of an enchantment.

Still, he’d been an [Enchanter] long enough to identify enchantments. Seeing the bubble around them, he looked at Ted.

“Solitude enchantment,” Ted explained, holding up a small wooden piece.

“I didn’t give you that,” Aiden observed.

“Nope.” Ted looked at the object as if he was impressed to have taken Aiden by surprise. “I got it in Trackback.”

Aiden cocked a brow in question.

“Oh, please.” Ted snorted. “You might be the one with intact memories, but we don’t all just sit around twiddling our thumbs while you go out on adventures.”

That was true. Aiden couldn’t expect everyone to simply sit and wait for his orders even though he often thought it was the safest option.

“So,” Ted said, looking ahead and plastering a smile on his face. “Déjà vu. What do you remember?”

“The bird,” Aiden answered.

“The rainbow bird?”

Aiden nodded. “It flew past me twice.”

“That’s it?”

Aiden almost chuckled. “Yes, Ted, that’s it.”

“It doesn’t seem like it’s something to be worried about, though,” Ted mused. “Why are you worried about it so much.”

“Because Nastild is a world of magic,” Aiden answered easily. “Things we think are simple things on Earth aren’t the same here. People on Earth believe they are having Déjà vu because they see something happen twice. Here it is not believed, Déjà vu is felt. No one has déjà vu on Nastild unless they’ve been affected by time magic in some way. No matter how minute.”

“I see.” Ted rubbed his jaw. “And you are sure this problem is based on an attack.”

Aiden looked down at the sac resting across his chest. The subtle glitters that had been on it once upon a time were completely gone now. It was now just a brown sac when it had once been an enchanted sac designed to conceal mana signatures. Unfortunately, it had done its best and failed.

Anyone with enough knowledge and a high enough perception stat would know that he was carrying something magical, something powerful.

“We have in our possession something that almost everyone will be willing to kill for,” he explained. “Then suddenly we are affected by time magic? I assure you that it’s an attack. The problem is from who and where?”

They passed more trees as they spoke, reaching farther into the forest.

“Any idea why you’re the only experiencing it?” Ted asked.

Aiden’s mind went first to the fact that he was already a regressor, a person who had truly traveled through time. There was also the part where his interface called him a prisoner. Perhaps the nature of his existence was granting him special…

He shook his head. It was the position of fools and gods to think that they were truly unique, and he was no god. He liked to think that he was no fool either.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “There aren’t many powerful time mages around. Off the top of my head I can only remember three time mages capable of affecting time on a wide scale on this side of Nastild.”

“What of the other side?” Ted asked.

“Maybe twelve. But they don’t cross over for a few years. I am aware of all the things that the truly powerful are up to right now. I studied them, their histories and their actions. I even know their secrets.”

“Worrying,” Ted muttered. “But okay. Then it is safe to say that one of the time mages on this side has decided to make us our friend.”

Aiden wasn’t sure of it since there were also time artifacts in existence. But he knew where those were, too. Mostly, they served to protect a person from time spells, but two were used to affect time.

Could someone have stolen one of them and chosen to use them to get the crystal? It would be sheer stupidity to make the trade, but people weren’t known for being very smart.

“I guess worrying is out of the question, then,” Ted sighed.

Aiden understood what his brother was saying. There was no point in worrying about something that you did not know and could not affect. Still, he had to disagree.

“There has to be something,” he muttered to himself.

He had to be missing a piece of information. Why was he the only one experiencing the déjà vu?

The thought continued to plague him as they moved along. At some point in time, Ted turned off the enchantment of solitude.

When night fell, Fjord was quick to gather wood for fire. Aiden sat, back pressed against a tree, and watched the rest. Everyone spared him a glance or two. He knew he should shake off his worry so that the others could be at ease, but he could not.

There was no level of fire power that could help you win a fight against a time mage whose skill or spell you had already been caught in. The time mage would know everything, and you would know far too little, especially in a situation like this when Aiden could not tell what exactly had happened leading up to the point of being affected by the skill.

When Fjord had a fire going, he put it out so that they only had the almost nonexistent light from the embers of the dying hearth.

Aiden watched these embers while keeping his attention on his surroundings. Oncot walked up to him as everyone began calling it a night and asked if he would like to keep first watch.

Using hand signs, Aiden informed him that he would keep first watch.

As he watched the man return to his place in the group around the dying hearth, Aiden knew that there were at least three people in that group that would not be falling asleep tonight, whether they were on watch or not.

They had a time mage to face in the future. The problem was that Aiden didn’t know how far in the future or how powerful the time mage was or why Zen had not used his skill.

What if we just haven’t gotten to the iteration that his skill will take? He asked himself, still staring at the dying heart.

You are distracted, he added, realizing that he was not using his eyes to keep watch.

Suppressing a sigh, he used [Enchanted Weave].

[You have used Weave of Perception]

As his perception rose, he sensed nothing out of the ordinary around them. It was good, and this way, nobody would be able to sneak up on them even if he wasn’t watching with his eyes.

Aiden stayed awake all night plagued with the worry that they were potentially up against a [Sage].

Even when shifts changed and Oncot took over, he remained awake.

He remained seated.

He remained thinking.

…

Three [Sage]s stood in a room to varying degrees of translucence. the [Master of the Order] sat at the center, parchments scattered all over the floor. He looked a disheveled mess, hair scattered and unkempt as if he had just gotten out of bed.

He and the [Sage]s, even if not all of them, had been going through it all for almost an entire day now. He had gone through his records spanning years older than even the Order itself. Records written on paper scraped from the first tree, before there were even any other tree.

Frustration clawed at him and he scratched his scalp through his hair like a mad man. Through the entire ordeal Torat had stood at the door of the office, a guard to the secrets of the truth.

“Do you think the library of living truth might have something?” one of the [Sage]s asked. He had made a place for himself in Nel Quan and favored the sword above all other weapons, not that he had not mastered them all.

The master shook his head. “Everything they know came from these archives. I might as well have penned them down and handed the information to them myself.”

“Have you accessed the vaults of restoration?” the [Sage] in Bandiv asked.

The master shot him a scathing look. “I am the vaults of restoration.” He tapped the side of his temple with a finger. “Everything in there exists in here.”

“Are you guys sure of this?” the [Sage] in Nel Quan asked. “I mean, there could just be varying anomalies. “Maybe there’s some confusion in the mana since some relative nobody just claimed a [Fragment of Nastild].”

The [Sage] in Bandiv paused to give him a look. “How do you know of this?”

“What do you mean?”

The master chortled. “Old whiny over there had to pay a halfling’s heart for me to tell him.”

“Oh.” The [Sage] laughed. “Must’ve hurt him.”

The master of the Order shrugged, noncommittal. “I wanted the heart of a true-born leviathan.”

He tossed a parchment of actual silver aside. It spoke of fragments but nothing of their effects of time.

“That was greedy of you,” the [Sage] in Nel Quan said, before turning to the one in Bandiv. “As for how I know, I was right there. I watched the entire thing. You gave up a very powerful kid, you know that?”

The [Sage] in Bandiv rubbed his forehead with thumb and forefinger as if he was tired. “Please don’t remind me. And now I’m not allowed to even go and get him back.”

“There are rules.”

The [Sage] groaned. “I know. Asshole over here already told me.”

The master raised his brow at the [Sage] in Bandiv. “Language. There are kids here.”

Of to the side, Torat did his best not to roll his eyes at him. The master wasn’t sure if it was out of respect for him in the presence of others or if he was scared of offending any of the powers present. It was not every day that someone found themselves in the presence of two [Sage]s.

“What about the others?” the [Sage] in Nel Quan asked.

The master and the [Sage] in Bandiv made dismissive gestures at the same time.

“You know that not all of us walk with knowledge,” the master said. “Besides, I reached out to them. They didn’t answer.”

He discarded another piece of information—a tablet made from leviathan bone. He watched Torat wince when the thing hit the ground like some useless item instead of the powerful item that it was.

“Is it possible that this is related to your search?” the [Sage] in Nel Quan asked.

The master shook his head. “My search is not time related. It is not possible.”

It was a matter of fact, as powerful as the item he had been searching for for years now was, it had no purview on time. It was not the problem. The dragon Sinepore also had an aversion for anything time related. It would not horde anything related to time so intentionally.

Still, the master considered it for a while before finally discarding the idea.

“Do you require more pieces of information, Master?” Torat asked, stepping forward.

The master waved him aside. “No, all these are fine.”

In truth, there was nothing in the Order that was not already in his head. All the things scattered around him were only present in the event that he remembered something incorrectly, which was an impossibility. Still, he could not leave stones unturned.

“What about the gods?” the [Sage] in Nel Quan asked.

“Not them,” The master said, hoping that he was right.

“Why not?”

“They haven’t been paying attention to Nastild for at least two months now.”

“Are you certain?”

“He just threatened to come to my land and kill its king not to long ago,” the [Sage[ in Bandiv said. “I believe he is right.”

The master rolled his eyes. “Alternatively, you could just check for yourself. I don’t think it should be that hard for someone like—”

“Do you require more pieces of information, Master?” Torat asked, stepping forward.

Everybody froze.

All eyes turned very slowly to Torat who stood guard at the entrance to the office. The master felt his blood run cold as all the people of power present said the same thing at the same time, muttered under their breaths like some curse.

“Déjà vu.”

“Impossible,” the [Sage] in Bandiv said. “We are above that.”

“Clearly not.” The master of the Order rose from the ground. “Memory banks.”

He could see all the [Sage]s present obey as he reached into his. People of their caliber did not experience déjà vu because their very existences had reached a point where their memories could not be unwritten. Not even by time magic of any level. Déjà vu was the mind grasping on to the last phantoms of memories unwritten due to a time phenomenon.

The [Sage] in Nel Quan was the first to pale.

“Nothing,” he muttered in disbelief, reflecting exactly what the master had in mind.

The [Sage] in Bandiv confirmed it next. “Nothing.”

Two more [Sage]s burst into existence within the room, translucent as the other two. One was a woman, and she spoke first.

“What have you done!?” she hissed in anger. “Time magic of this level will bring the greater gods down on us!”

The master of the Order had greater worries than her ire. “Please shut up, sister. This problem is older than you are aware.”

She opened her mouth to say more when the [Sage] that had arrived with her pointed to the ground.

“Look,” he said. “The parchments are all time related.” He paused to look at her. “Memory bank.”

“Don’t waste your time,” the [Sage] in Nel Quan said. “It’s empty.”

She frowned. “Who could possibly be powerful enough to cast a time spell enough to affect all of us to the point of déjà vu. We can survive a time spell affecting the entirety of Nastild itself.”

“Perhaps one affecting more than Nastild,” the [Sage] in Bandiv said.

The master wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a joke but it was enough to make everyone present pause.

“You don’t think…” one of them began, unwilling to continue the sentence.

“A time spell that goes beyond Nastild,” the [Sage] in Bandiv mused. “It would have to affect an entire section. Time has already been a mess for the last two months and counting.”

“And that’s around the period they stopped looking,” the master mused.

“It might not be about us, though,” the woman said. “Right?”

The master would’ve liked to think that. “Sister dearest, can you please check if any system admin has been contacted in the last two months.”

She paused. “There hasn’t been an attempt at contact for more than three civilizations now.”

The master said nothing to that, knowing very well that she was checking.

“No one would be foolish enough to…” her voice trailed off in horror. “At least twice in the last two months.”

The [Sage] in Nel Quan staggered. “Who would be so foolish?”

The woman looked up at all of them in horror as she gave her answer.

“Nastild.”

“Torat,” the master commanded.

Torat went down on one knee. “Yes, master.”

“Assemble every single member of the Order. Now!”

“Yes, master.” Torat rose to his feet and was already leaving. “For what purpose?”

“War.”

Torat stopped in his tracks, faltered a little, then left the room.

The [Sage] in Bandiv laughed. “What is your little rag tag army going to do, lick the boots of the gods”

“If the gods are coming,” the [Sage] that had arrived with the master’s sister said, “I do not intend to go down without a fight.”

“Why would Nastild try to contact the admins?” the master’s sister asked.

The master took a glance at all the communications. “And all contacts were successful. It is completely surprising that it took them this long to finally come.”

“We can’t win against the greater gods,” the [Sage] in Nel Quan said. “You all know this.”

“There is also a possibility that they are not coming for violence,” the [Sage] in Bandiv said. “If Nastild has contacted them multiple times, then perhaps they are coming to fix a problem, one that has required time magic. You will need time to reset time, after all.”

The master worried his bottom lip between his teeth. That was also a reasonable point.

The greater gods were coming to Nastild.

He almost laughed.

The impossible was about to happen. Nastild would be turned on its head.

“We need to create backups,” he said suddenly. “I refuse to lose the memories of what happens once they reset the time.”

“What if they already have?” his sister asked. “What if we are currently living in the reset timeline?”

The [Sage] of Bandiv shook his head. “We would know. The rest of the world would be none the wiser, but we would know. We would hold no knowledge, but the level of déjà vu would be different.”

The master of the Order nodded in agreement. “We are currently living in the time before the reset. Time, craft us a chamber. We will store our ongoing memories there.”

“I gave a world enchantment to the Lacheart boy,” the [Sage] in Nel Quan said sheepishly. “It was interesting at the time, and it was not time related. I figured that should enter the chamber as well.”

The master sighed at the [Sage]’s recklessness but said nothing.

When the [Sage] in Bandiv began casting, everyone present was on their toes. Their lives were about to change, and they all knew it.

Nobody cared about a child holding a weapon capable of desolating cities in the right hands.

…

The jepats had had their rest but it still wasn’t enough to justify pushing them into full gallop. Right now, the team had them basically jogging through the forest.

They’d been at this pace since getting up in the morning. Aiden remained skittish, terrified of the unknown. His fears continued to affect the team around him. It shed a poor light on his leadership skills. But time magic was not to be trifled with.

Zen pulled up next to him, his jepat keeping pace as he tried to make sure it didn’t go too fast.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Aiden.

Aiden shook his head. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Maybe, but I just feel like I have. I’ve got one job, to scout ahead. And I can’t see whatever you think is about to happen.”

Aiden looked at him. His perception was high enough that even the trees blurring past and the speed didn’t affect how clearly and precisely he saw his old friend.

“I keep wondering if I should use the skill now,” Zen continued, eyes squinted against the passing wind. “But I just feel like I’ll know it when the time comes. Like I should—”

Aiden’s senses flared and he veered his jepat to the side. With his perception heightened from his constant weaving over himself since last night, he had sensed it before even knowing.

Something went hurling through the air. He picked it up in the blink of an eye, along with its trajectory.

A spear, he thought, hand shooting out on its own.

It wasn’t aimed at him, however. Instead, it made a straight line for Zen.

“AMBUSH!” someone in the group bellowed.

Aiden’s hand closed around the shaft of the spear as it passed him.

The spear slipped through at the last moment.

He'd missed.