The room itself had two beds across from each other, with nothing but a small table beneath a narrow window between them. Hilda sat on the right and I on the left one, across from her. It seemed she didn't have a roommate (the other mages asking not to room with her for fear of their souls getting destroyed, apparently) and thus it was fine for me to sit there.

"Th-The first spell," Hilda began, her head turned completely to the side such that she was facing the wall and looking nowhere near me, "is Darkness Orb. It's really basic and the first any Cursed mage learns. It looks like this. Yamiyo tekiwonagure." An orb of darkness with purple smoke radiating off it appeared above her hand. "It's like any Elemental attack, you fill it with mana and it grows in size and strength and stuff, but it has some quirks."

"Quirks?" I asked, putting all the interest I could in my voice.

"Yes. Yes, quirks!" she declared, sounding a lot more confident now that she had gotten in the groove of explaining. She was still facing and talking to the wall, though I noticed her eyes glancing my way out of the corner of her eyes despite the rigidity of her head. "The thing is, everyone thinks it's just a ball of darkness, but that doesn't make sense. It obviously doesn't make sense. Right? Right?"

It felt like she wanted an answer here. "Right. Because..." I trailed off, trying to think of any possible answer. "Because normally darkness is the absence of light, and it doesn't make sense for the absence of something to actually hurt stuff."

"Right!" she exclaimed, half-way leaping out of the bed with excitement before abruptly sitting back down, which caused some miscellaneous bouncing which I shan't describe further. "Right. It makes no sense. It's so dumb. How could anyone ever think that actual darkness could hit something? What do they think darkness is, a thing they can touch? Huh? Huh? So dumb. No, what Darkness Ball does is it destroys light. Most Cursed spells are based around destroying stuff in one way or another. If you're ever lost on a Cursed spell, maybe just think about it in the context of destroying stuff." Hilda was talking very fast, breathless due to never pausing to inhale or anything. It felt like she was afraid that even a single second's pause would be enough for me to get bored and leave. "So obviously, Darkness Ball destroys stuff. It destroys light, and makes its energy from that. The ball itself is energy created from destroying the light. The more mana you pour in, the more it destroys light, and the more efficient it gets. Actually, everyone thinks light is naturally good against darkness, but this is why it's not. If you hit it with light, you just make the ball stronger."

"Wow. So the light doesn't just overwhelm it? You can't make a Darkness Ball vanish through light?"

"Weeell..." She trailed off, deflating a bit. "It's a numbers game, kind of. At that point, I mean. A tiny little ball like this wouldn't destroy the sun. It's just an efficiency thing. You would take, like, ten times as much light as there is darkness to destroy a Darkness Ball. It's better, but not invincible. It's... It's better though!" she declared, loudly.

"Cool. That's an awesome spell. Thanks for telling me about it." All I learned was some trivia, so not exactly a huge score, but nothing wrong with biding a little time.

"R-R-Right! Okay. Spell two. This one is a huuuge deal." She gave a kind of strangly-sounding choke while trying to empathize 'huge.' "It's called Soul Spy. All you need to do is eat a little bit of someone's soul and you open a scrying portal to them. You can't look around, only at them, but you can see the background and hear what they say and stuff. It only has a range of 100 meters though. Also, the more soul you eat the bigger and clearer the image gets, but it fades over time when your own soul eats away at theirs until it's gone."

"You... Eat their souls?" I asked. My tone must have sounded noticeably unsettled, given the look of abject horror that dawned on the half of Hilda's face that I could see. Or more like a one/eighth due to all the messy hair.

"Nononono! Yes! But no! Your soul is in your whole body, right?! So you just need to eat some of their body!"

"I..."

"Nononononono! Like their hair! Nails! Blood! Stuff that grows back! The soul grows back with the body!" She was practically shrieking, and trembling. I got the feeling that this was the part of most Cursed lectures that ended up with people avoiding her for the rest of her life, and possibly launching witch hunts against all Cursed mages in the world. Fear not, my friend. I'm already dead inside.

"Fascinating!" I said with faux-energy. To be fair, it was fascinating. Only the energy part was faked. "That's super cool. Since the souls grow back, you can basically have a link with someone at no cost. It's even a little romantic, isn't it?"

"RIGHT?! IT TOTALLY IS!" Hilda exclaimed, actually jumping out of bed this time. She made eye contact in her exuberance, then yelped and sat back down in a hurry, shooting her head back to the side. Boing boing.

"Can you demonstrate it? Do you have it activated for anyone?"

"Yes. I mean no. I do, but I can't. I mean, I said I wouldn't. Emergencies only," she mumbled.

"C'mon, please? The way you put it, they won't even know what happens. It'll just be a second," I said. Was this peer pressure? Yes. Was it morally wrong? Yes. But, the way I saw it, violating the trust of someone in a soon to be eradicated timeline was small cake compared to the heroic justice of giving the protagonist a nifty spell he may or may not ever use in his life. I mean, again, this will sound edgy, but I wasn't much one for moral codes. If you show me a victimless crime in a soon-to-be eradicated timeline, it was basically impossible for me to care, even if hypothetically I would if I subscribed to an all-emcompassing moral code to define my behavior. A believer of the categorical imperative I was not.

"M-M-Maybe. You can. Give me. Some of." Hilda froze, unable to finish her janky sentence.

First, let it be clear that I had genuine respect for how she was managing to get so sweaty that even her pitch-black robes had visible sweat-stains forming in the parts caught under her arms; spots so damp the sight of them actually made me feel I would somehow drown from a distance. I wasn't even sure how it was possible to make pitch-black clothes darker, but Hilda had managed it, and for that she had my undying respect.

Second, let it be clear that she did not feel any romantic attraction for me. By my measure, at least, there was no romance or love going on here. She had almost certainly not fallen for a guy she just met during their first-ever conversation (from her perspective). At times like this, I found it valuable to flip the chessboard of gender, so to speak, and think about it from the opposite perspective. Imagine a nerdy dude. He's natty ultramaxxed due to exercising in his room and posting on fitness forums online, but due to his lack of fashion sense and tendency to rant about video games, everyone avoids him. Now imagine a, well, let's say a fairly attractive girl walks up to him. (I didn't know what my own face looked like now, but if it was improving with my muscles, it had to be at least decent now.) Let's say that attractive girl expresses an interest in video games, invites him to spend some time alone, and then listens with rapt attention as he mostly one-sidedly rants about video games. Would there be any love there? Would the nerd fall in love with the girl? I say no. I say there would be a moderate amount of sexual tension, perhaps, but that's it. There would be stammering, perhaps an offer to eat the girl's hair and/or nails, but it would be platonic in nature. Just two new friends working out some potential sexual tension. Nothing more, nothing less. It was a challenge that all male/female friends had to face, however briefly, and that was what was happening here.

Thus, understanding that she was just being polite and offering to use Soul Spy on me simply to satiate my curiosity, I shook my head. "Maybe we can just both close our eyes, you use the spell, and I feel its energy in the air. Sound good? Nobody will see anything, no privacy broken."

She peeked this way. "Wh-What? But why?"

I shrugged. "I want to be in its presence more than anything," I said, which was honestly the most pathetic half-truth I had said yet.

"Um." (I think she noticed). "Okay," she said cautiously, like a nerd re-evaluating an attractive girl who had claimed to be interested in video games, then revealed she only played Candy Crush or somethin of the like. "Turn around so you can't see. I'll hear if you turn again."

"Sure." Darn, not trusting me to not open my eyes. Wise girl. I was totally planning to, thereby establishing me as an edgelord breaker of promises.

I turned, and once I was finished, she made the chant. "Tamashinozoki," she said, and after a pause, she continued. "Okay, you can turn back around."

I did so, and once I was back in place, I realized she was looking straight at me. I think she was so confused by that exchange that she had forgotten to stare at the wall instead of staring at me with her wide, dark purple eyes. God, I don't mean this in a "I'm so in love I get absorbed in them" kind of way, but seriously, ye gods, talk about bottomless pits of despair. It's like I can feel my soul getting sucked out of me just by making eye contact. Look at me now, I'm not even saying anything, I'm just monologuing as the purple fills my vision and the vortex sweeps me away. I wasn't even really seeing her face or anything, it was just a circle of smooth white surrounding all... the... purple...

"Um," she said, turning her head and snapping me out of it. "Was that okay?"

"Huh?"

"The second spell. Soul Spy."

"Oh... Yeah, yeah. Being in its presence definitely, er, definitely gave me the spiritual and emotional peace I was looking for. Thanks." Not sure if I'll be able to replicate the spell just from hearing it, but it was going to be hard to experiment.

"G-G-Good," she stammered, sounding relieved. There was a pause. "You know, I like the Heir too. The stories I mean. The prophecies."

"Huh?"

"Th-The Heir. You know." She glanced at my chest. Mirin? She flicked her eyes up, then stared back at the wall. "Don't you?"

"You lost me. Who's the Heir?"

She shook her head violently, messy hair getting even more messy. When she stopped it all but covered her face, with strand after strand sliding off. She apparently had no compulsion to speed things up and wipe it off herself. "Nevermind. I'm dumb. One more? I must be boring you by now. I always talk too much. You must just want to see the spells. Who cares about me? I just rant and rant and rant." She shifted on the bed a bit, causing some of the robe caught under her arm to slip out. By god, it was a massive circle of darker-than-black. "And rant and rant. About creepy stuff, too. Eating souls and stuff, I mean, it's just Cursed magic, I think it's nice and romantic and nice, but like, nobody else does. You know a lot of Cursed mages don't even like what they do? They hate that they were born with it. Everyone wants another Arcana. Boo hoo. Not me. I like it, so I'm a freak among freaks. 'There Hilda goes again, eating souls for fun!' they all said. It wasn't for fun, it was for research. They should know that. They should know that!"

I got the impression her demonstrating a spell that required the consuming of someone else's soul, followed by me silently staring at her, had made her nervous. It was time for damage control.

"That's messed up. In my opinion, eating someone's soul is a very personal and, like I said, potentially romantic thing. It's like connecting to someone on a deep level, via consuming then slowly destroying their soul. You can't get that kind of connection elsewhere. It's just dumb to mock that or hate it. They were probably just jealous of your handling of the spells. Incidentally, where did you get the souls to consume?"

"Oh, I just pulled hairs off the girls I didn't like and ate it all in front of them," she said casually. A truly tragic past; to think she was bullied so unfairly and without just cause.

"So... Next spell?"

"R-Right! Right right right. Stupid me. Umm, it's been awhile, so maybe this can be the last one. Don't want to bore you to death, Malcador, hahaha!" She forced a laugh. It honestly hurt my ears a little. How. "Okay, um, ummm... Blind! That's a classic. Blind. It makes a black miasma and blinds people."

"Forever...?"

"No! Nononono. No." (I got the feeling another Cursed spell did, and she was hoping I didn't press for details.) "This is actually more, um, more of a sense-negator. You put it on their head and they can't see, hear, taste, smell, or feel anything. If it's really weak, it's just a dark cloud, though. Watch. Sharmodoki." A dark cloud appeared above her hand, then disappeared. "I-I'm not going to use it on you, don't worry. Hahahaha. Hahahaha."

Okay, I have to describe the forced laughter. It was like a malformed toad wanted to laugh, but due to being born without vocal cords capable of human laughter, it was forced to kind of gurgle and choke out a facsimile of true laughter, a mixture of sharp high-pitched HA-s and pained, bubbly ha-s. I did not have any idea how a human throat could possibly produce those noises, and could only imagine an entire childhood of her being yelled at whenever she laughed, such that she was constantly torn between letting the laughter out (sharp, high-pitched HA-s) and containing it (pained gurling). I thought she was dying every time she laughed. Maybe she was. I didn't have a savior complex—really!—but I wanted to save this girl from this laughter in particular. I could envision an entire character arc about nothing but fixing this laughter, and the final scene would be her giving a quiet, normal laugh, and everyone watching would weep tears of joy and clap until their hands went numb out of sheer enthusiasm for what grand development and growth had occured. It would be like all of Shakespeare's characters morphing together into one singular uber-character who experienced uber-growth concentrated exclusively on her laugh. That was how character development worked, I think.

Also, to be clear, despite comparing her laughter to the output of a malformed toad, I want to firmly re-establish that she did not have a toadlike appearance. She had a very pretty face, all things considered; if you have ever yearned in your heart "I wish I had a goth GF", you could guess that her face was much like the face of your ideal goth GF. The messy, coarse black hair and clammy, pale skin didn't exactly do her any favors, but I mean, I wasn't going to judge. And, to be fair, the contrast between her pretty features and disastrous everything else was kind of intriguing. She didn't have any glasses to dramatically remove, but I could foresee quite a transformation. Properly washed hair, skin tanned in the sun, and ma—

"Hahaha!" came a choking gurgle.

Nevermind. Maybe some people were doomed forever. I had hope for humanity deep in my heart, but maybe that could be humanity minus one.

A knock came on the door, and then a man came in. "Hilda, are y-" He stopped.

Hey, this is the Mystic! I know you. You don't know me.

He looked between us, no doubt noticing Hilda's even more disheveled-than-usual hair and massive sweat stains, then ventured to rise an eyebrow. "Am I interrupting something?" he asked, sounding like he really didn't want to ask that. It was easy to forget due to my perhaps abnormal priorities, but a crucial member of the fort had been assassinated in a surprise ambush just fifty-some minutes ago, and people were no doubt still reeling. You don't really want to think about scandalous bed encounters less than an hour after an assassination. It just was't right.

"Yes," I said. "Yamiyo tekionagure. Think fast." I flicked the Darkness Ball at him, intentionally weakly so that it would float towards him slowly.

"Mahotomare," he rapidly chanted on instinct, forming a nondescript blue wall which hit the Darkness Ball and seemingly destroyed it.

There was a pause.

"What?" he asked, any anger he might have felt being overwhelmed by sheer, pure confusion.

"It was a test. You passed, good man." I stood up. "Well, Hilda, thanks for everything. I hope to see you again soon."

"Bwuh, bwuh, bwuh," she stammered, no doubt torn between wanting me to stay (?) and wanting me to leave so she could puke in the corner from stress. Again, flip the gender chessboard. It all makes sense if you flip the gender chessboard.

As I passed the Mystic I patted his shoulder. A silent appeal, a signal of 'good luck' to a fellow brother. I saw him incline his head slightly in a nod. Godspeed, brother. The trick is to be welcoming and non-confrontational. And to compliment the color black.

"Hilda, can you try Soul Spying Rose an—" I heard the Mystic begin as I shut the door behind me.

I walked down the hall, mostly aimlessly, while thinking things over. By my estimation, I had ten minutes at most before I had to bust out the secret strategy which would hopefully save me from the most devastating pain I had ever experienced in my life (Yes, even worse than Hilda's laugh). My priorities were to test out the magic I had potentially learned, then steel my nerves for the upcoming loop. First things first.

"Check Status," I murmured.

General Information Attributes Skills Name Malcador Name Value Name Level Species Human STR 121 Mysticism 8 Sex Male DEX 121 Athletics 5 Age 18 AGI 127 Dodging 4 Class Hero (Level 3) END 127 Curse Magic 3 HP 254/254 (+1.27/sec) INT 127 Throwing Weapons 2 MP 254/254 (+1.27/sec) WIS 127 (more...)

Interesting results. It was lucky I hadn't gotten any STR or DEX buffs yet; hopefully you'll believe me if I said I was tactically avoiding swords purely to analyze the level up formula. Thankfully, due to my rational gigabrain, I could deduce from these numbers that leveling up applied a multiplier to my base attributes by 10% for each level up (e.g. 100 going to 110, a 1.1x increase). The key to this puzzle was that the attribute bonuses given by skill milestones were described as base attributes being increased. That was why my INT and such was 6 greater than my STR and DEX, rather than 5 - the base value had gone up by 5, and then got multiplied by all my existing levels.

It didn't take long to figure out this system was busted. A 10% increase for attributes per level meant my attributes would double every 7 to 8 levels, and every skill milestone I got would become more strong with time. Right now, an attribute bonus is only +6 for me. 5 * (1.1^2) = 6.05, rounded down, presumably. But if I were to reach level 30, it would be 5 * (1.1^29) = 79.3, rounded down. That was an impact of 73 more attribute points for the same relative milestone. Not to mention that, technically, each milestone I already got would only get stronger each time I leveled up. My level was like a stat multiplier rather than a one-time increase. Each increase to base attributes would be buffed by every single level I already had, then be buffed further every time I leveled up. The +5 was already +6, in a few levels it would be +11, and then it would just escalate even more expontentially. If I got a +5 later on, at level 30, it would start out at 79.3, boosted by all the levels I already had.

There was only one conclusion I could draw from this. The cards were stacked way, way in my favor. I had exponential growth here. By the time I was level 30, every single level up would be getting me as many attribute points as I had in total right now. Over 100 points for each attribute in a single level. What? Who did this?

I shook my head. That was reading too deep into it. No doubt the enemies would be growing exponentially in strength, too, and this was kind of a moot point, since even being stuck at level 1 permanently would be a worthwhile trade for a friggin' timeloop ability. Well, maybe not in my current situation, which may or may not have spawned me past the point where I could manipulate or guide others into a winning state, but surely in future situations the time loop would be more valuable than anything. Who knew if a high enough END could stop an arrow to the skull from killing me instantly?

Anyway, moving on with my last-minute checks.

"Spellbook."

Elemental Arcana Mystical Arcana Cursed Arcana Restoration Arcana Natural Arcana Reverse Darkness Ball Heal Magic Barrier Soul Spy Blind

Neato. I even got Soul Spy despite not seeing it, which strongly implied I just needed to hear the chant and my brain... like... just learned what to do. Or maybe I really did just need to soak in its presence. Honestly, if I were to try to metagame, I would guess I needed to be in the spell's presence since otherwise I could just find a book-of-all-spells and master every spell at once, but... That called for more experimentation another day.

The question now was whether I should try exploiting Timothy for Elemental skills in the like last few minutes I had left, but all things considered I wanted to be alone for what came next. That was why I had wandered down the halls, increasingly far away from the entrance and people, until I found an empty room in the back. I walked in, shut the door, and walked to the other side, where I pressed my back against the wall and stared straight forward, pasing the time only by casting my new spells and gauging the result out of the corner of my eyes.

Last time I had been knocked out for some indeterminate amount of time, so I couldn't measure it exactly, but it felt like it had taken about an hour before it happened. I had been trying to be conscious of the time, and I felt like it would be happening soon. Back to the wall, eyes forward, door shot, windows slit, high off the ground. This was probably the optimal place to be wh—

The portal appeared silently, an oval of roaring fire that produced no sound. Out stepped Wannabe-Sauron, in his suit of spiky metal armor and wielding his spiky as fuck trauma-mace.

"It is called Doomed for a reason, young one," came his gravely voice as he lifted his arm and stepped forward in preparation for a downward swing.

"I'm going to be pissed if this undoes my stats, y'know. QUICKLOAD!"

Everything went black.