Dressing himself, he went to his desk to write down all he remembered from the book kept in the hidden library. Jotting it all down, it seemed to have been a complicated spell that had something to do with diseases. The complexity of it all broke his tattered mind even more, so he ignored what the words meant and simply wrote them down.
Having all the papers, he crudely bundled them together using a straw from his curtains. Seeing his somewhat crude masterpiece, he was certain that this time, he would be able to succeed.
It was still extremely early in the morning. Time was crucial. Hopping to it, Jason went outside only to find himself struggling to walk straight. Grasping his head, he gathered what was left of his spirit, found his balance and continued.
'Not many tries left,' taking a moment to collect his thoughts, he calculated that he probably had a few more tries remaining after this one.
Seeing he had no way to stop the secretary from visiting Murph, all he could try was to get Murph out of there. Without him having any kind of authority to persuade the man from following his orders, he was obligated to request the aid of his overseer.
Visiting the library, Jason's derelict state certainly attracted a lot of attention, for better or worse. Without thinking, Jason went to where he found Rubelia last time. Grasping the bundle of papers in his hands, he felt a small hint of desperation blossom from the bottom of his heart.
As he was going through the motions, he never stopped to think about how he would convince Rubelia. Freezing in his tracks, a small gear in his head popped into place as the question of the paper's legitimacy appeared in his mind.
Scratching the back of his head, he felt the hairs fall off his head. Looking at his hand, seeing the strands of hair, Jason's questions became worthless as he would force her to believe it no matter what.
"Rubelia," his voice hoarse, "I need a love letter from you to Razir. What do you want in return?"
It wasn't even posed as a question with genuine curiosity, as if he knew exactly what she would say. Rubelia felt a little overwhelmed by his sudden approach and strange request. Still, while in a downtrodden state, she recognized the famous commander in a heartbeat.
Seeing her so happily nod and take out a little paper to write on, Jason saw the images of her dead body overlap her face for just a moment. Jason tried not to think about what he did, even if reality blended with his nightmares, he focussed on what had to come next.
Grabbing the paper out of her hands, he didn't even read it as he simply nodded. "I knew you would ask something like this. I've come prepared. This is one of the books of the hidden library. I can't give you full access, but this should be enough to come to an agreement, right?"
Rubelia's surprise was somewhat hidden due to the book's cover veiling her mouth, the only sign being her eyes suddenly widening was enough for Jason to feel confident that this would work.
Glancing at the pages, her eyes widened even more as she realized this wasn't some normal tome. Nodding, she dutifully fulfilled her part of the deal, writing a neat love letter to Razir. The trade deal was awful, and the repercussions of someone having the power of those tomes might prove disastrous in the future, but then Jason would have another chance at rectifying his past mistakes.
Right now, what he needed most was the survival of Proktor. Everything else came after that.
Moving his decaying body out the library doors, the thunderclouds in the sky did a good job hiding the sun. For once, Jason was glad he didn't have to deal with the piercing rays of the sun when he already felt terrible enough as it was.
Seeing Razir and his company in the distance, his grip tightened on the newly written letter. This time, he would make sure both Razir and Murph were battle-ready. Their victory would be assured with both powerhouses at the front.
"Who do we have here? Captain Jason, here to bid us farewell?", his almost boastful communication style bothered Jason to no end, but he was here on friendly terms.
"Captain Razir, good morning. I have a request for you," rectifying his mistake from last time, he started off with a kind greeting.
"And what would the oh-so-precious commander's pet need from me?"
"I would like you to stay here for a single day," completely ignoring his comment, Jason barely even heard what he said as he was just going through the motions.
"Why would I do that? We're-"
"I know where you're going Razir, just stay here for today. That's all I'm requesting. I'll even do you a favor."
"Hah! A favor? Then get me... a holiday leave from the commander for a month," laughing out loud, the piercing laughter almost broke Jason's mind. All the work he did was to get this jerk to stay here, never did he think to calculate the randomness of the man in question.
"Why did I even think you would even remotely act accordingly?", Jason murmured to himself. "Fine, here, take this. Would this convince you to stay?"
"Hmm?", grabbing the letter, he slowly read it as his face started to glow red before quickly returning to normal.
'Did he use magic to hide his blush?', feeling his perception of the brazen captain turning upside down, his reaction was slowed, giving Razir the time to put the letter away before nodding.
"Fine, if you want me to stay so badly, I'll stay for just a single day. Men! Make yourself useful around here, we're leaving tomorrow," turning to face Jason, he put on his signature big smile, "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have something urgent to attend to!"
Enthusiastically hopping away, his subordinates felt like their captain had gone insane as he skipped towards the library. Right when they were going to say something, Jason left them in the dust.
'Now I just need Murph.'
Entering Graham's office, he found the man smoking his cigar as he overlooked some papers and maps. Lifting his head, the figure of Jason entered his vision, but the man looked like he had aged a decade overnight. "Are you alright, Jason? You look terrible."
Hearing such a crude remark, Jason could only agree. "I'm fine commander. I just have a request for you."
"And what might that be, Jason? Do you also want to go south?", many of the captains and their squadron were finding ways to entertain themselves after all.
"I have a premonition that something bad is coming to us. I've had a terrible nightmare warning me about the dangers ahead. We need all our Rank 3 mages at the ready."
Jason spoke with conviction and despite his tired state, Graham could almost feel his determination. The commander had no proof that a storm might come to knock on his door. Despite that, he knew not to put aside Jason's worries. There were countless examples in the past where the man saved their hides due to a premonition he had.
Since his state this time was even worse than before, he knew not to take it lightly. Not that he would drop everything to comply of course.
"Look Jason, I can ask Murph to come here, sure. But Razir has orders to go south, and the visiting secretary is independent of Proktor, I don't have authority over him. If he decides to leave in a crucial moment, I can write a complaint to commander Rylo, but that's about it. As long as he doesn't disturb the peace or break any low, he's free to do as he pleases."
"I've already convinced Captain Razir to stay here for another day. That should be plenty. I would rather we send the secretary away, but having him here might not be that bad. All I want is for Murph to stay with us for a bit."
Graham was surprised to see that he was able to convince Razir since the man was raring to go south. 'If he managed to convince that hot headed man despite their rivalry, this is more serious than I thought.'
"So be it. I'll call for someone to pick him up. The man needs his mandatory breaks as well, and I still had some forms for him to fill in. Might as well bring him here to do so."
Despite the contradicting statements, Jason had no complaint. It took quite some time before the old archivist arrived. Seeing him slowly step into Graham's office, he looked extremely out of place. Without his complementary books, pages and boxes, Jason saw someone else.
"Welcome Murph, it's been quite some time."
"Yes," his voice groggy, slime seemed to have been building up in his throat. He didn't look pleased standing here, which didn't slip by Graham, but he was doing this for Jason. 'It's just a single day, he won't complain too much, will he?'
Taking a chair, he sat down, after which a massive pause was created. Nobody said anything as they just waited around the room. Graham thought about the forms the man had to fill in, but he didn't even have the guts to bring them up. While commander, Murph had been here a lot longer than he was.
Having a mage in seniority below him felt strange.
Jason suddenly looked towards the window, staring at the clouds in the distance. "It's here."
A shrill screech resounded throughout Proktor, scaring everyone awake. Graham turned towards the window, seeing a blob of darkness in the distance, a flash of lightning showed the immense amount of monsters.
Graham's eyes widened slightly, before he turned to Jason. He just nodded, "A flock of Croctows. They are weak to fire, but far from afraid of it."
Murph looked through the window, but they were too far for him to make any kind of conclusion, making him note down Jason's impeccable eyesight in his mind to later copy to his personal file.
"What's the plan?", Graham asked since it looked like Jason had already figured everything out.
"These monsters are extremely violent, the faster we hit them the less losses we'll have on our side. Distance is of importance. Also, they use the lightning from the storm to paralyze their opponents. I've already checked out the weather this morning, it's artificially created. We're being attacked."
Jason spoke with an underlying tone of dread, one Jason rarely use. Seeing his distraught state and the events playing out before him, Graham nodded in response.
"Ring the alarm, bring everyone inside Proktor and have Razir man the wall. Murph, you're with him, stand on guard and protect the weaker mages."
Everything happened in a flash. Without the secretary's involvement, Murph stood next to Razir on the wall, with a hunched back of course, not that it devalued his power.
Jason felt that this was the best possible set up. Having three Rank 3 mages, they actually stood a chance against the others.
'Make your move,' Jason thought as he stared deep into the forest beyond their castle walls.
As the monsters slowly got closer, Razir, Graham, and Murph used their aura to pressure them down, but they were with too many. Shooting off large fireballs from a distance, Razir created a firework show of the monsters.
Jason avoided the northern wall, instead joining Graham on the tower overseeing the battlefield.
Seeing the big losses from the group of monsters before they even arrived filled Jason with hope. There was still plenty to be wary off, but this should save at least half the mages located here.
'We got this.'
Filling himself with hope, he joined the fight as the monsters entered his range. Shooting off spells, the entire mage corps from Proktor joined him as a massive amount of spells flew through the sky. A smile blossomed on his face as he saw the pack of Croctows diminish slowly but surely.
With the pressure slowing them down and the powers from all the mages, the areal monsters stood no proper chance.
As he grew more confident a glint in the distance brought him back to reality. The explosion that blew up the entire northern wall always came suddenly. Any kind of information that he could get now would only ease his next run, if necessary.
Mere seconds had passed before he was able to tell what that glint was. A small arrow, just without a tip. Instead, a small bulb seemed to be on the end of the arrow. It glowed light blue, making him think it had to be created from Pure Mana, but that would've been a waste of energy.
The arrow flew with immense speed through the air. Despite its unaerodynamic design, it flew as if it had no resistance. There was nothing he could do to stop it, but he had to confirm that this was what made the wall explode.
As the arrow hit the wall, the bulb broke apart, like a glass shattering apart. Contained within was only visible for a small moment. A pulsing dark red mass splattered across the wall before a massive dome enveloped the northern wall.
Jason looked up at the ceiling of the dome, only to find the sky tinted the color of blood. As he looked down, he stood on the edge of a cliff. Fearing his fall, he took a step back, only to hit someone. Panicking, his eyes quickly searched for what he bounced against only to find Rubelia with her eyes gouged out standing there.
His heart raced as he took a step back, feeling the soft ground. His mind raced as he suddenly stood in a brown grass field. As the sky seemed to bleed, he saw a sea of corpses. All the lives he had forgotten, all the lives he abandoned as he searched for the perfect flow of events.
The corpses all rose from the ground, each emitting a horrifying scream as their faces became disfigured, but recognizable.
"Why did you have to kill me?"
"Why leave me behind and not them?"
"Was I not important enough to save?"
"Do our lives mean nothing to you?!"
Each corpse reached out to him, wanting to make him repent for his actions. Jason never stopped to think what would happen to all the people he left behind when he traveled back in time. All the lives he had to sacrifice to save as many others, all of them had a reason to exist. Yet Jason denied them of their lives, choosing to sacrifice them to save someone else.
Jason grasped his mouth as bile rose up, clutching his stomach, its contents dropped on the dead ground. Standing up, he felt a massive sense of guilt set in. "You abandoned us!", a little girl cried out.
"You don't get it! I tried my hardest to save as many people as I could! I never wanted your death!", trying to reason with the sea of dead bodies, Jason's tears had long formed.
"Then why did you leave us? Was there truly no other way? You couldn't try again?", the voices spoke almost in unison. Each reprimanding all of Jason's actions. Scenes from his past flashed in quick succession, with every scenario, he chose between people.
Each path he adjusted, he dropped people and saved others, but who was he to choose?
"You don't understand! I only did this for the betterment of everyone! I saved the most lives!", Jason screamed out his emotions, which he couldn't place anymore. As the voices kept wailing, Jason couldn't tell if he felt depressed or furious.
Running away from the sea of corpses, he felt his emotions being heightened as the sea surrounded him. Hands from all sides started to cling to him, grasping his flesh tightly, hurting him immensely.
Pulling the hands off only made room for another to dig their broken nails into his clothes and skin. "Just leave me alone!", closing his eyes, he threw a punch towards the ones reaching for his face.
His hand was swiftly caught as an ice-cold feeling crept to the back of his spine.
"What are you doing Captain Moore?", an angry voice shook his body and mind as he realized he was back on the tower next to Graham. His arm was locked in his fist, his face making it clear that depending on what he said next, would result in his arm staying whole or not.
"Commander Graham! My-! I'm sorry, I was caught up in- I can't explain! The soldiers!", Jason realized that if he was caught in that dome and experienced that, everyone had to be. Graham seemed to be fine though, his cold face said more than enough.
"We're too late, they've all gone insane," Graham pointed towards the castle wall. Still in the dark red tinted dome, the soldiers all had the look of fear or fury in their eyes. Fighting one another, the Croctows mattered little now as the brutality of man was on clear display.
The scene made Jason freeze in his tracks. He had seen plenty of battlefields, but that was wit against wit, strategy against tactics. This was just primal. Barely a single mage had escaped the grasp of the dome.
Suddenly, he felt his body getting extremely heavy, as if he was being pulled to the ground again. The pressure was something only a Rank 3 could accomplish. The sea of corpses flashed across his eyes, before he felt Graham's rough hand on his shoulder. The pressure vanished.
"MURPH! GET IT TOGETHER, YOU APE!", Graham yelled at the top of his lungs, even pouring mana into the sound waves to increase his field of influence, yet all he achieved was the awakening of some mages. But even if they came to realize what they were doing, the others were still at their throats, continuing the cycle of violence.
Jason's fears manifested before his eyes as Murph was enwrapped in the dome. Whatever the visions or hallucinations were showing him, he was unable to split fiction from reality.
Luckily, Razir was out of it, helping Graham to stop the unrelenting pressure from Murph. As a Rank 3 mage, Razir was powerful, but if one of the lesser Ranked mages pierced him with a conjured weapon, he would be done for. So he quickly ascended to the sky to help from above.
"Hey Commander! The hell is happening?!", Razir was as flustered as Jason was, but he held himself better together.
Graham raised his own pressure on Murph to limit his movement and capacity for danger. While Graham was a commander with decades of experience, Murph had long outlived him. The total amount of power Murph was capable of handling was much larger than Graham could handle alone.
"Jason, Razir, get people back to their senses! Remove this dome! I'll handle Murph!", Graham knew that he wasn't able to handle his archivist all by himself, but it was the best possible solution he could think of.
Flying over to Murph, he body slammed the man through the nearby tower, launching far away from the battlefield. "Captain Jason of the 13th Squadron will be in charge until I'm back!"
Disappearing from Proktor as he said that, Jason was left with a group of mages who had lost their minds.
'No! They haven't lost their minds! They're just experiencing something, a hallucination or an illusion. No, the former!', Jason's thought patched together to form a concrete plan on how to fix the current situation. Mages were dying left and right, Razir couldn't stop all of them on his own.
"Jason! What do we do?!", yelling out for support, Razir had his hands full to think about a solution.
'Graham got me out of it by using ice? No, was it just cold elemental energy? Is cooling down the solution? Wait, how did Graham escape it then?'
Smacking himself in the face, he knew this wasn't the time to ask questions. Seeing only a single possible solution, he jumped down on the wall, landing on the corpses of the already fallen ones.
Rushing towards the first page he could find, he grasped their head in his hands before sending a ton of energy containing the attributes of ice to the mage. It took only a second before the mage suddenly blinked twice, and his eyes widened in surprise.
The mage could only ask what happened before Jason yelled it out, "Razir! They need to cool down! That's the way to remove the effect of madness!"
'Thank you, Graham!'
"Then do it already! I'm not specialized in ice or anything like that!"
Jason froze in his tracks as he realized that Razir was a mage that specialized in a single field, Fire. Any other elements were deemed too much effort or complex to learn.
"Let's do it together. You just need ice, right?", the mage he just rescued said with a confident tone.
'That's right! I'm not alone!'
"Correct, save as many as you can, aim the energy at their heads just to be certain," Jason added, not knowing for sure how the cold energy was meant to calm one down. He only saw Graham fix him, so using that as a basis, he started to treat as many of the mages that he could, slowly turning the tides of madness.
Seeing the mages fight in the square, he vaulted over the rubble blocking his way. As he fell down to the square, his heart froze for a single moment as the wall behind him blew up into smoke.
Being launched towards the center of Proktor, Jason crashed through the wall, his body covered in wounds. He felt no response in his legs, but knew not to look for them.
He failed again.
The pain was tremendous, but it mattered little. He had to move, speaking the runes felt impossible, as he coughed up blood. Using that as a medium, he started to draw all the runes necessary for his travel back.
Ignoring the screams of agony, he was solely focussed on writing the runes. Slowly, one by one, the runes kept forming as the wailings of the damned softened in volume. Second by second, mages were dying from lunacy induced mania or their visitors.
Jason hadn't heard them enter, but the familiar explosions and the sound of swords swiping through the air at high velocity weren't forgotten. When not a single voice screamed for help or out of anger, all Jason could hear was a terrifying nothingness.
From that nothing, two pair of footsteps appeared as they slowly closed in on his position. Feeling his body collapse and mind waver, Jason had trouble writing down the last couple of runes necessary for his spell.
There was nothing he could do against them, especially now. All his efforts, in vain, once more.
Right as he finished his spell, a sword came flying through the air, the blade made contact with his neck before everything turned into a pitch black nothing.