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The young princess of Songli had made a lot of great food for breakfast. Fluffy omelettes, cinnamon rolls, coffee in abundance, mounds of potatoes and onions, and thick-sliced piles of bacon were all on the menu. Nirzir had been rather delightfully happy to make it all, too; for the last hour, she had been humming to herself in the kitchen, singing minor starter songs that might soon become Songs of the Harmonic Void, as she tentatively named her new magic.

Everyone seemed to be having a decent morning, or evening, since some people were headed to bed after this.

But Erick threw a wrench into the mood, asking everyone, “Any problems happening around here? Anything strange going on in your lives or in what’s been happening around us that I should be aware of?”

Nirzir paused as she shoveled a minor hill of pan-fried potatoes and onions onto a plate for Teressa. “Uh.” Nirzir’s good humor soured, as she worriedly asked, “Why?”

Jane pointed a fork at her father, saying, “You want to get a war started around here? Because that’s how you get wars started.”

“Doesn’t take much to tip the Path one side or the other,” Teressa agreed. “But for what it’s worth, I haven’t seen or heard of anything, either when I’m with you, or when I’m out with the girls.”

Poi, who was having dinner to everyone else’s breakfast, sipped his bubbly berry tea, and said, “I have heard of nothing untoward, either. I feel your fears might be unfounded, but this is the Worldly Path, and events do seem to spiral with remarkable regularity.”

Jane eyed the drink in Poi’s hand, saying, “Do you like that blend, Poi?”

“I do.” Poi said, “I mostly like the carbonation, though. Anything with sugar and flavor would do similarly well.”

Erick brought the conversation back, asking, “No one has seen anything? Nirzir? Nothing?”

Nirzir shrugged. “Enduring Forge is one of the safest places I have ever been.” She dished out some more breakfast, saying, “You hear stories that some places are safer than others, and I expected to encounter some sort of problem down here, but there’s been nothing. The light even seems brighter around here, if you can believe that. The people in town remind me of when the people of Eralis started to hear that you had ended Terror Peaks; there were minor and major celebrations everywhere.”

Erick had seen those few celebrations, and he had tried to focus on the good, but the horrors of war and the aftermath of all that destruction had dominated his mind back then… Only two months ago. Had it really only been that long? It seemed like yesterday.

His trip to the grasslands had turned out well, in the end. Was this that, again?

Erick guessed, “Could I have killed the problems coming at Enduring Forge by Resetting their lands?”

Teressa smiled wide, happy to say, “Look at that! You solved the problem before it was a problem!”

“The tournament you talked about is still over 13 days away.” Jane asked, “So unless you want to stay for that, then we’re gone? My sword is coming in today and that’s the only thing I’m waiting on.”

“My armor is a necessity as well,” Poi said. “Luckily, the Armorsmith has [Perfect Fit], so we won’t have to wait around for refitting, not that they could do much with adamantium resizing, anyway. We could be gone tomorrow.”

“Would have come in yesterday, but I heard Darabella was delayed.” Jane looked at her father, and teased, “Is it going to get delayed again?”

Erick felt a brief flicker of embarrassment. He had delayed the master Adamantium Rune Smith for a full day, hadn’t he? Erick decided to discard that useless emotion, and said, “I think my meeting with Darabella was extremely productive, so I’m probably going to have another visit with her today, if she’s available. Expect delays.”

“Hmm.” Jane looked to her father, and a concern passed across her face. “I guess so.”

Teressa had a similar look to her. She glanced to Erick, seeming to confirm what she was seeing, then she looked to Poi. Poi said nothing, as he sipped his berry soda. Nirzir almost missed the chair as she tried to sit in her seat. She managed, but it was an almost-thing.

It seemed all of them had figured out that Erick was interested in Darabella at the same time, though Poi knew long before now, for sure.

So! Might as well pull off the bandaid.

Erick said, “Darabella is nice, but nothing is going on there—”

Poi frowned at the obvious lie. Everyone else seemed to take personal offense at the lie, too.

“Okay. Fine. She’s nice. I like her.” Erick said, “I’ll leave it at that.”

Jane frowned a little, but she pulled back her judgment, and asked, “Is Enduring Forge going to get a Yggdrasil, too?”

Erick had too many ways to go with that denial, so he named off the first few. “Firstly, me liking someone does not mean that their town gets a Yggdrasil sapling. Also, Yggdrasil hasn’t made any mention of needing to be in any more places than he already is. And I would never make world-altering decisions based on my likes or dislikes of someone I see in some other part of the world. Nothing has even happened yet.”

Jane dropped the conversation like it was poison, her entire demeanor shifting away from confrontation, toward vindication and relief, as she said, “Good.”

Erick didn’t feel like pursuing that topic, either, so he dropped it, too. Instead, he asked, “So what’s everyone else’s plans for the day?”

Nirzir looked to Jane, then ignored whatever had happened, and said to Erick, “I’m going to try making some spellwork soon. Maybe tonight. Could I ask for your assistance, then? It’ll be on the surface sometime after sundown.”

“Sure!” Erick happily asked, “What sort of assistance?”

“Just general backup.” Nirzir spoke as though quoting someone, “One should not attempt arcane designs on one’s own.”

“Of course,” Erick said.

Teressa said, “I’m doing whatever you’re doing, since Poi’s off to bed.”

“And I hope to be there for at least 8 hours, or until the deliveries show.”

The conversation moved on.

Erick casually interrogated everyone over their recent lives, looking for trouble that anyone might have spotted, but apparently no one thought the lack of problems was a problem. Erick hoped they were right. He hoped that Enduring Forge would be a quick and painless stop, with nothing much happening at all besides meeting nice people and learning about new-to-him magics.

- - - -

Erick arrived at the Rune Smithing tower with little fanfare except for the rapid evacuation of almost everyone else in the building, except Darabella and the guy at the front desk. After seeing that rapid exit, Erick promised himself that he wouldn’t stay too long today, but he was still going to get his lesson in, and perhaps maybe ask Darabella out on a date. Maybe she’d like to go to the banquet? That was coming up in a few days.

He met with Darabella on the third floor and rapidly got through pleasantries, the entire first few minutes passing like he was a teenager seeing a pretty girl for the first time, this time, though, he didn’t flub his words. But then, somewhere between a blink and a smile, Darabella got concerned and quiet.

Erick’s paranoia shot through the roof. Had he read the signs wrong? Had he misinterpreted what he was seeing? Maybe he wa—

“They’re talking of moving the tournament to this week, instead of next week; 5 days from now instead of 15.” Darabella said, “It’s because they want you to be here for that and they asked me to ask you to stay, if you were willing.” She rapidly added, “But you do not have to stay if you don’t want to; it’s completely up to you.”

… Ah.

Apparently Darabella had been charged with a task, to ask him to stay for a specific event, and she was worried that he would take it badly. But why would he take it badly? If a surprise tournament was the ‘big thing’ to happen in this part of the Worldly Path, then that was fine! More than fine, really. Erick was thrilled.

Erick said, “Nothing wrong in a tournament; yeah. I can stay.” He smiled, feeling lighter with every passing moment. Maybe Darabella would like to go to the tournament with him? Or… Maybe the banquet is better. Erick put off asking that question, though, as he said, “Jane wanted to go to the tournament, anyway. So what’s it all about? The tournament? Will there be a problem with people who planned to come already?”

“Oh?” Darabella stood stunned. Then she registered his words, saying, “Oh! You will? Great!” Then she heard his question. She added, “Uh. There shouldn’t be any planning issues. We have standing invitations to select groups of people all across Nelboor and the Near Underworld —anyone who can pay the entrance fee, anyway— so it’s not like this is some massive tournament that we can’t change dates on. But I don’t really pay attention to all that. I rune the weapons, and occasionally they turn into artifacts; that is the extent of my involvement in all that.”

Erick’s mind skipped a track.

“… ‘Occasionally they turn into artifacts’?” He laughed. “What?”

“Oh yeah.” Darabella waved her wooden knife, saying, “I’ve made four of them this past year, while five others have produced six, and that means we have 10 to give away as prizes.”

Erick remained perplexed, and it looked like Darabella was headed off on a tangent, so Erick pulled her back, “What do you consider an artifact?”

Darabella blinked a bit. Then she said, “The standard definition? Magical items that don’t decay due to use? Or overuse, either? Same as I heard about your rings.” She added, “The ones we make aren’t that great, though. Not as nice as another 25 points to All Stats. But they’re still good.”

“Ah? What kind of artifact, though? I thought you could only make magic last longer inside an item— Oh. That’s it, isn’t it. The magic never fades if you make the runes perfectly.”

Darabella smiled. “Yup! That’s it! Flying swords that never stop flying. Various other trinkets, sometimes— Well. It’s more like times-ten duration. Not forever. Making an artifact out of runes is a rare event that happens sometimes, but when you rune 20 pieces a day for a full year? It happens more often than you’d think.”

“What sort of weapons will be available?”

“Let’s see… I think there’s four flying swords. Those are extremely popular weapons so they get made all the time. Three of them are adamantium, but one of them is bloodsteel. That one was a special order, but since we ended up with an artifact, we had to make a second bloodsteel sword for the customer since he wasn’t willing to pay the artifact price. Second one was not an artifact; the customer was still happy.” Darabella said, “And then we have four flying shields; rather common defensive items there, too. Then we got a mage staff and a flying pair of ingots.” She said, “Those ingots were more of a joke item, but don’t underestimate the power of blunt adamantium [Strike]ing with the force of a 100 Strength warrior behind them. I think one bar is 10 kilos and the other is only three, so someone would have to make use of that discrepancy, too, which is a whole other problem.”

Erick had questions. First, he asked, “Ingots? As in ‘an ingot of steel’ that you melt down and turn into a weapon?”

“Exactly, yes.” Darabella said, “Once adamantium cools to a solid it’s near-impossible to change back into a usable form, so we plan our pours to the gram, but stuff goes wrong sometimes. Twice, in the case of these ingots. One of our crafters decided to try and make something out of the remnants. They apparently threw a whole bunch of odd runes onto the ingots —[Flying Heavy Striker], [Flying Speed Striker], [Flying Heavy Shield], [Flying Speed Shield]; those are the main ones— along with some connecting runes. More of an experiment than a real diagram. And it worked!” She smirked. “It worked really well.” She lost her smile. “They’re terribly hard to use, but some warrior will be able to use them, for sure. Someone always is. The tournament is first place through tenth, with winners taking their prizes from the lot in the order they’re won. If someone doesn’t want the weapons that are left, then they get their entry fee back… I think that’s how we’re still doing it?”

“That sounds rather interesting— The runic weapons, I mean. I want to know more about the connecting runes, but you mentioned a staff, and I see the blank staffs over there, but I haven’t actually seen a real runic staff before.” Erick asked, “What sort of spells go into a staff? How does that work?”

Darabella scrunched her lips, saying, “Making weapons for mages is always a difficult thing because they’re always unique items. The artifact staff for the tournament is no exception; I made it, so I would know. It’s based on [Flying Scorchball]. Do you know that spell?”

Erick rattled off, “[Conjure Force Elemental], base, then [Force Bomb] with Mana Altering for Fire for the Burn effect, along with the addition of any of the more permanent Force spells, so that the Bomb doesn’t explode; more that it just flies around at your command. It’s almost a mobile Rift-type spell, but aspected for damage, instead of buffing. The perfect resulting spellwork is tier 2 or 3.”

Darabella nodded, then said, “Making mage weapons is complicated, because you have to take all of that and put it in a weapon that acts as an anchor for the spell, and not as a destination of the spell, which is what happens with normal runic inscriptions. If you make a mage weapon wrong, by, say, sticking a simple [Fireball] in a staff, then you’ve handed over a self-exploding weapon to a person. More of a trap than a usable tool. You have to do like what I showed you with the [Floating Platform] to hold the [Light Ward] in the air away from the steel plate.

“But I’ve done this many times before, so I made the weapon to the man’s specifications, and it ended up an artifact. The first [Flying Scorchball] cast with staff will remain under the control of the user for an indefinite amount of time. You can still have up to 5 Scorchballs flying around alongside the main one, but every Scorchball past the first only lasts 10 minutes.

“The customer didn’t like the artifact price, so he learned the hard way that runes should be implanted into weapons by a master.” Darabella said. “He blew himself up and we ended up with a weapon that not many can use.”

“Oh.” Erick frowned. “Poor guy.”

Darabella nodded. “About 36,000 gold poor, yes—”

Erick stifled a sudden laugh.

“—so now his weapon goes to the tournament, instead.” Darabella said, “The guy was a competent caster, too! He could have paid the artifact price money rather easily by hunting down some grand cores. It’s not like these weapons go bad.”

Erick nodded. “So how do you make a good mage weapon, then?”

“Hmm… You want to make one?”

“Yes.”

Darabella nodded, then said, “Let’s start with the theory and implementation of joining runes together, first, and then we’ll go from there to making a mage weapon.”

Erick nodded.

Darabella trailed her knife through the air, conjuring lightwards to explain herself, as she said, “There are two ways to join runes together. The first, and the easiest, is to place the desired runes on two ends of a system. A ‘system’ can be any single metallic object.

“There’s some complicated math involved here based on the magic saturation rates of metal and the outflow of spell effect and the distance between runes and a whole bunch of smaller stuff, like the type of metal you’re using, with magical metals of all kinds generally being better for all runework than mundane metals. But we’re going to ignore all of that, for now, and I’ll give you a few good rules to follow, and there is some math involved in this.

“For every letter of a completed rune, the magical effect imbued into that rune will effortlessly transmit a decimeter through the material in a spherical area, not a linear area, with the runework at the anchored center.

“This means, if you have a ten meter long stretch of steel that is a meter in diameter, and you put [Conjure Weapon], which is 8 runes, onto the caps of both ends of the system, you have made a system that will fail. The runes simply will not link that far.” She drew out some math, saying, “The volume of the area that [Conjure Weapon] can imbue is .27 cubic meters, while the volume of the 10 meter long cylinder is 7.85 cubic meters, meaning that to make a 10 meter cylinder of steel into a weapon, would require at least 27 joined carvings of [Conjure Weapon].

“Also, ‘spherical area affected’ means that if you have a cylinder of steel only 10 centimeters in diameter, and ten meters long, which is a volume of .08 cubic meters, then a single [Conjure Weapon] rune will affect the entire system. Wires are very good for conducting runes.

“Large scale runework is very complicated, though, and much more complicated than simply ‘carving more runes’, or ‘making the system thinner’, but that’s as far as we’re going with that, right now. Because you also have to take into account the area affected by the original spellwork which exists outside of the affected metal, which is also attached to the runework you imbue.” Darabella said, “For instance, [Flying Weapon] naturally allows for the user to use the conjured sword in a close-range area, which varies by specific person.

“But ignoring those variations, now we get into multi-imbues, which temporarily throws everything I already said out the window, because multi-imbuing changes everything.

“For every spell imbued into those runes, you double the distance that the runes affect, multiplying the volume affected by around 8. The average runework is more than enough to cover most every person-sized effect you would ever need to consider, from pixies to orcols, because, notice I said ‘spherical area’, and a sword is much, much, much less than a sphere.

“Now: there’s two parts to most spellwork. For [Conjure Weapon], there’s the actual effect, which is a sword in hand, but there’s also the connection it has to you, which is a lot more ephemeral. It is through the usage of this secondary aspect of spells that we are able to make mage-rune items; that we’re able to project the spellwork away from the staff.

“But unless you make this secondary aspect of your mage runes well, then you’ll only ever end up with staffs of [Fireball]s that explode in your face. Normal enchanting doesn’t have this problem, because the core dust takes care of all of these problems for you. But runework very much has this problem. The artifact [Flying Scorchball] staff I made had a range of Large, because it was very, very well made, with lots and lots of runes.

“[Flying Weapon] swords are limited by this spherical restriction, too, but you always use those close to your body except on rare occasions, so this is fine.” Darabella stopped her lecture, to see if Erick was understanding.

Erick summed it all up, “Expansive runework systems are needed to make a large item function properly, while specific runeworks are needed to ensure that you get range for your imbued spells.”

“Exactly.” Darabella said, “[Conjure Weapon] is 8 letters, so with a single set of runes you can fully rune swords of all but the most impractical sizes, since you’re still holding onto the weapon yourself.” She added, “Another way to increase range is to increase the number of spells you imbue into the item. Simply casting the same spell into an item twice will double the range, more than octupling the area affected. A third cast will only increase the area affected by half of the number of runework letters… And I think I’ve gotten into the math too much. But we can do a bit, here, to illustrate the progression.

“8 letters means .8 meters, which means about .27 cubic meters of volume. Let’s overcharge the [Conjure Weapon] with another cast, for 1.6 meters, or about 2.14 cubic meters of affected space. A third cast brings us to 2.4 meters, though, or about 7.24 cubic meters. The second imbue octuples the volume, but the third imbue only increases it by a factor of 3.4.

“Diminishing returns on volume and distance start to hit even harder than that, once you get up to four imbues. And while overcharging runes provides a brief boost of distance, that distance settles down to more duration rapidly enough, at a rate that goes down about as fast as the original spell’s duration decays, based upon how much overcharging you’ve done.

“Now, when it comes to very large systems, with many, many people putting in more and more power, you’ve practically always on the lowest end of a downswing.” Darabella said, “Your range is more or less at the original size. But your duration is very, very large.” She looked to Erick for confirmation of understanding.

Erick said, “More power is useful temporarily, when the system has nothing in it, but more than anything, the number of runes in a system is what determines the distance the runes work at.”

“Correct.” Darabell said, “But we don’t write novels in weapons, for the mana prefers simple to complex, and too many directions will confuse the final product, just as it would for any actual tierwork done in the creation of higher spells.

“And this is where we get complicated. As in ‘creating spells’ complicated. Because that’s what we’re doing when we create mage-rune items. The user of the [Flying Scorchball] staff will essentially be creating a new spell every time they use that weapon, for non-standard, self-centered effects are difficult to make the mana understand what magic you want out of it.

“[Flying Striker]? Perfectly understandable; it's a weapon that’s controlled with your mind, which is what you’re already doing when you put a sword in your hand and swing it with your real muscles. [Flying Striker] uses an effect tethered to you, using your own physical capacity, except done magically, with as much skill as you possess yourself. Simple stuff. Using a Flying Weapon is about as hard as swinging a sword with an arm you didn’t know you had.

“[Flying Scorchball]? That secondary aspect of spells comes up again, because what have you made? Is it a [Fireball] centered on you? No. Is it a randomly moving conjured elemental? No. Is it a summon under your control? Yes. How does that work? Telepathically? Not really; it’s more of a general guidance which some people do with verbal commands, and some do with other means. Pointing and intent can fill a lot of blanks, but that’s not good enough for a spell effect you want to use strategically, and allow it to work under its own auspices.” Darabella said, “And this is why mage-runecraft is harder than warrior-runecraft.

“But there are solutions.

“For mage-rune items, you center your runes around the end-effect; simple, just like carving [Conjure Weapon] into a sword. But this will usually blow up in your face, so you have to add side-runes in an order-of-operations-like methodology. This is fine for base auras, though. A staff of auras is easy to make, and easy to power, too. But other spells are harder.

“For [Flying Scorchball], you actually add in a bunch of stuff that isn’t part of the spellwork itself so that the mana understands what you’re asking of it. For the staff I made, I added [Force Bolt], for the homing aspect and control aspect, along with [Force Platform] for the stability and more control. The guy who ordered the weapon was very skilled at controlling his spheres of power, but a weapon cannot do this without considerable intelligence, so several chained runes went into the staff to replicate his own honed capability and to allow the conjured elemental some of its own ‘fill in the blank’ power.

“Because putting a spell into a staff is essentially handing over most of the spell to the staff, itself.” Darabella said, “It’s complicated.” She smiled. “So let’s work out some of those complications! Now for this lesson, we’re going to be creating runes which will allow an imbued lighward to create a ball of light that hovers outside of the metal plate which contains your runework. So to do that, we will…”

Soon, Erick was carving.

Light and [Ward] were the first two runes, joined with a simple line, since that’s how you joined runes together. This prompted a small discussion about naming conventions because Erick had not written [Light Ward], which was Darabella’s preferred incarnation of that particular rune set; he had written them with the bracket spell designators only around [Ward], while Light was left on its own. Erick’s design worked, though had a different meaning than Darabella’s and was probably what caused the steel plate of the previous day’s wardlight experiment to light with a fluorescent bulb-like effect.

Then came [Force Platform], written smaller than the main runes, along with a single line branching off from the thicker line which had joined Light and [Ward] together. [Force Platform] was a subordinate spell to the main effect, after all. In this way, you would end up with a lightward floating in the direction the runes faced.

If, however, you did a trio of lines that joined every single word to each other, or a branching line that joined the three runes together, then you’d end up with the steel plate becoming the centerpiece of a solid light effect, instead of having a floating ball of light hover a meter away from the spellwork.

Usually.

“You can end up with really odd effects with seemingly insignificant changes in operational structure.” Darabella said, “But even more than that, if you imbued runework with spellwork that isn’t the main focus of the runes, then you’ll switch everything around, and you’d end up with the steel plate becoming a very weak [Force Platform] that glowed a bit. This is due to a loss of effect because you put the wrong magic in. This small bit of loss isn’t anything special, but when you run magic through a hundred different runes, then those inefficiencies add up exponentially. But go ahead and try imbuing [Force Platform] instead of a [Light Ward]; it should still function, somewhat.”

Erick did so.

The small steel plate acted exactly as Darabella expected it to act; a gently glowing [Force Platform] that looked both small, and weak. The steel plate itself hovered next to him and moved around tethered to Erick, as Erick moved, testing the spell. It behaved exactly as a [Force Platform] should, but then Erick pressed his hand onto the metal plate and the spell broke. The steel plate clattered to the ground.

He picked it back up and imbued it with a lightward.

A ball of light sprung out of the plate’s surface, to hover a meter away from the steel. Erick shook the steel plate, and the ball of light lazily tried to remain a meter away from the runed surface. Then Erick rapidly moved the plate through the air, from one side to the other, and the ball of light tracked its anchor, always attempting to remain a meter away from the front surface of the metal plate. Erick spun the metal plate, and the lightward tracked that spinning, too.

… There was a lot of potential here, but for exactly what, Erick could not say.

Darabella smiled the whole time Erick experimented. When he finished, she said, “Looks like you made it perfectly well! Let’s move on to more complicated experiments. Any requests?”

“Sure.” Erick asked, “Could I make a rune that only turns on when someone touches a part of it, or imbues a basic spell into it, triggering a main effect? No need to imbue spellwork at all?”

“Ah! So you have been reading up a bit! This is a triggering effect, and it’s necessary for all the higher uses of runes.”

“Uh. I haven’t read anything at all.” Erick said, “Nice to know my guess was correct, though.”

Darabella smiled wide, then said, “Let’s move on to triggering mechanisms, then. Let’s make a staff of [Glowballs]s that stores four [Glowballs]s and then releases at a target with the power of five [Glowballs]s when you put in number five. It is easy to extrapolate this mechanism to larger workings, like for making a staff of [Grand Fireballs], but through the use of runes, it’s considerably easier than trying to actually make that spell, or that staff. Mana costs and opportunity costs not taken into consideration, obviously.”

Erick was all ears.

Darabella nodded, saying, “There are two ways to make a staff of grand [Glowball]s using runes. This is why I spoke of the area of spellwork as it is linked to runework being dependent on several factors, of which infusion speed and decay time are the two most important factors.

“It is through this mechanism that we can make imbued spellwork ‘cross thresholds’ and thus trigger.

“The first way to make a staff trigger and release a [Grand Glowball], or whatever, is to make it so that when you throw five [Glowball]s into the staff in five Script Seconds, the expansion of area of effect caused by the imbued spellwork’s existence will trigger a release of the imbued spellwork.

“The second, much better way to make a staff of [Grand Glowball]s, is to make the triggering mechanism a different rune system, that can link to and trigger the main rune system via the expansion of affected area effect. In this way, you can actually stick many, many more [Glowball]s into the [Glowball] rune system, and they can lay dormant until the triggering rune is flipped. With a well-enough made system, you could soak a staff with a thousand [Glowball]s, and through utilizing ten different triggering systems, you could have a staff that triggers up to ten times in one hour, or, with a much more complicated system, you can have a staff that triggers once every other Script Second.

“The first method is safer, but opportunity costs are terrible when you’re in the moment, and everything you do matters. It’s fine when you have all the mana and time you want, but what you need is power. This is often not the case, though, since mana and time are usually much more important than power.

“The second method is for when you can prepare ahead of time, and then unload your spellwork when you need to. The second method is the preferred methodology, since it allows you to spend mana and time when you have extras of both. Either formation can create artifacts, but I prefer the second formation, because of stated reasons. This is the methodology that I carved into the staff of [Flying Scorchballs].

“That particular staff is rated for a million mana worth of [Flying Scorchball]s, which is about 4000 casts. Releasing the first, and permanent scorchball is necessary to release all the rest, and it can be released once per half hour, for 10 mana a pop, with the trigger based on [Force Bolt], which acts as initial destination/target for the [Flying Scorchball]. More scorchballs can be released for 10 mana per ball, with a max of five out at any one time, each of those extras circling around the main ball.

“There’s a third storage and triggering method that is rarely used, but we will talk about it if only to acknowledge it, for this third method is far beyond the skills of most Rune Smiths. This third method is used at the Bastion Down Below, where we have canisters of [Fireball] that we can fill up off-site, and then, during a time of trouble, we stick the canisters into the cannons. One hit of the triggering runes will discharge the cannon, firing off a [Grand Fireball] that is almost a Super Large Area spell.

“I’m going to teach you the first two methods, because the triggering mechanism is more delicate than the main mechanism, and works on an arcane understanding of runes.”

For a long moment, Erick was reminded of how Darabella had mentioned that runework was sort of like [Renew]. Now that she spoke of ‘triggering mechanisms’ and ‘canisters filled off-site’, Erick believed her. He said, “So you really can take a dozen [Fireball]s cast by a dozen different people, throw them in a canister, save it for a later day, and then fire off all that spellwork at once, when needed?”

“Very much, yes. But we’ll work on [Glowball] today.” Darabella smiled, happy that she had been fully understood, as she added, “A flash of light is much easier to recover from than a room full of flames!”

“But what about the fact that magic from different people doesn’t like to mix?” Erick asked, “That cooperative casting is a big hurdle to overcome when dealing with magic cast by many separate people?”

“Oh? We mostly dodge that problem through the use of runes.” Darabella said, “Proper runework will force the spells cast into them to adhere to certain shapes. Like…” She paused in thought. She said, “Imagine instead of carving runes, you’re carving a hole into a sheet of metal of a certain shape. Imagine punching a four-point star into a sheet of metal. This shape defines the shape of the spells that can be accepted by the metal. Now, with everyone else, they all cast their ‘star magic’ of different shapes. You got your bulbous stars, or five-point stars, or three-point stars. But the rune does not move, while the magics of people are mutable. So when a caster shoves their star into the star-shaped hole, the caster’s star either bends to fit the shape, but with loss of power, or it doesn’t fit at all.

“I believe I mentioned that some people could not contribute to the [Light Ward]s of Enduring Forge? Or to any of the other spells in the runic web, for that matter.” Darabella said, “This is the ‘cooperative casting’ problem; most people can shove their spells into the proper slots, but with a bit of loss, but some people cannot fit their spellwork into the system at all.

“This is also why I have the Class Ability of Greater Shifting Runes. It’s not so useful for the runic web of a city, but for artisanal weapons, used by the specific people they’re made for, this allows the runes I scribe to shift to better fit the spellwork shoved into them.”

“… Oh.” Erick was struck by the idea of [Renew] again, and questions spilled out of him, “Could anyone shove any amount of mana into a fixed rune and have the magic described by that rune function as written? What about a filtering system for mana, so that any input could be transformed into the appropriate output? Could I make a runic web that allowed people to shove in any amount of mana they wanted, and the outcome would be a [Prismatic Ward] sized to the runic web?”

Because that would solve the problem of town defense; such a solution could be easily sized to any city and population.

… But it probably didn’t work like that, and as Darabella took a little while to consider her response, Erick realized that it very much didn’t work like that.

“Mostly no. Technically yes.” Darabella said, “Such a working is possible, and people have been trying to do it for a long time with some success, but this is the problem of shoving the wrong magic into a runic web. For small systems, you simply get odd effects, but for large systems, you end up with nothing. We do have a few successful examples of what you theorize, though. Those successes are locked up in vaults in the noble district. I have seen several of them, but mostly… The problem is mana conversion is very, very costly. For a thousand mana input, for such a conversion, you might get a single mana of properly aligned output.”

Erick breathed out slowly and with great deliberation as the weight of Darabella’s words took hold. If he could refine a process that had already proven possible, then…

That would be [Renew].

Thinking about it now, such a spell would probably look like a donor taking their mana and making it manifold and —for lack of a better classification at the moment— ‘bouncy’ or ‘flexible’, or something like that. The mana would have to be stable enough to stick together through the paring-down process that seemed to occur it went through a runic web, through a bunch of molding runes, and then entered the final casting runes, taking on the exact shape it needed to take before it was ‘shoved into the star-shaped slot’, as Darabella put it.

He might be wildly off-base with all of that, though.

But according to his own Undertow experiments, it was certainly possible to Drain a person’s mana and use that mana in a zero-loss manner to bolster the Undertow spell. Therefore, it should be possible for a sufficiently advanced runic system to be able to accept raw, donated mana. And if not, then Erick could just make a runic web with an Undertow spell inside of it that could then do most of the required ‘molding’ work.

Erick said, “So this is all really amazing. I’m glad I came here to learn this.”

Darabella grinned, showing off pearly teeth. “Me too! So let’s work on a staff of [Glowball]s— Ah. Wait. Uh. I have a few adamantine pieces to rune today. I think your daughter’s sword and your other guard’s armor are among them?” She glanced up, and up, at Teressa, then turned back to Erick, saying, “Yup. Your other guard’s armor. The smaller one.”

Teressa grinned in the corner of the room, saying nothing.

Darabella said, “Want to see me rune those items? Then I can answer all your questions about those and then we can make the staff of [Glowball]s; All of these lessons work well together.”

Erick said, “I would be delighted to see all of that, and then, if you have any recommendations for any reading, then I would be honored to know those recommendations, too. I can get out of your space after that, since I know you must be busy.”

“No no!” Darabella had a controlled panic, then she calmed, saying, “You don’t have to go that fast! But… Reading? Eh…” Darabella said, “Yeah, we have some books… Nothing published like the Arcanaeum Consortium publishes them, but we do have our own logbooks of runes and diagrams and all that.” She said to him, “Anyway. It’ll take twenty minutes to do your daughter’s and your guard’s items, and then we can move on? Sounds good? We can take all the time we need, or want, Erick.”

Erick smiled. “Sounds great.”

“Then let me set up some stuff…”

Darabella told Erick what she was doing as she went to the various wooden crates sitting to the side of the room. With a flick of her wooden knife, she popped open the crate labeled for ‘Jane Flatt’. With a quick dig into the woodchips inside, she retrieved the weapon. Jane’s black sword was a weighty thing of 6.5 kilos of solid adamantium, hilt and all, with a blade a meter in length, and a 30 centimeter hilt. It was single-edged and straight, with a straight-back tip and no crossguard at all. It was meant to be able to fly and pierce into then cleave out of an enemy, and it seemed rather capable of doing that, looking much like a weaponized length of rebar, and not much like a proper sword at all. Still, it was what Jane had wanted; a bit bigger than a normal sword for her size frame, and heavily focused on cutting power. Packed away in the box was a little removable crossguard, too, which could slide onto the blade and click into place, but for now, the removable hilt remained off of the weapon.

The weapon itself already had nascent grooves, pre-carved, that would accept the main [Flying Weapon] runes that Darabella was to imbue. Darabella would be putting a bunch more smaller, refining runes into the entire piece, where she felt like it, but those smaller control runes had not been pre-carved.

Working on adamantium after it was allowed to cool was a large problem, though, and carving runes was no exception. Darabella had a solution to that, though. She brought the sword over to the white stone table and locked it into place in the center, then she went to the manasphere controls at the side of the room. Those controls connected to the surrounding wall, and the adamantium spheres that rested upon that wall.

“You might feel a tingling in the air; that’s normal!” Darabella said, as she touched off some complicated shifting of the controls, sending bright copper glows into the workings.

Two stories down and floating on the wall around the whole tower, meter-wide adamantium spheres began to softly glow with a burnished-copper light, like the sea at sunset; the color of Darabella’s mana. Those orbs rotated slightly, aligning ‘properly’, whatever that meant; whatever was happening out there was too far out of Erick’s expertise to understand. All he truly knew was that, yes, the air did start to tingle, and his mana sense dropped to maybe half of its original distance. Darabella was letting her Domain out to play.

Darabella said, “Step back, please. Beyond the black line in the floor.”

Erick did so, stepping a good two meters away to leave Darabella as the only one in the room near the stone table, near the sword. This was fine, as Erick’s Perception, remaining mana sense, and his good eyesight was more than enough to see the smallest details that she might carve into Jane’s sword.

“When I pick up my actual enchanting blade, please do not talk to me, or disturb my creation. We can talk after I put my tools back into their box.”

Erick nodded, saying nothing. He watched.

Darabella looked to him, and seeing compliance, she nodded, too. Then she closed her eyes.

The manasphere tingled. The world seemed to highlight with color and sensation as Darabella opened her hands and relaxed, dropping her wooden knife as she metaphysically let her hair down. Her Domain blossomed outward, highlighting the world near her in fractured rainbows. And then she opened her eyes, and glared upon her task. Her and the sword; those were the only two things in the entire world at the moment. She smiled a cutting smile as her eyes focused her dissecting sight upon the length of Jane’s future weapon.

And then she breathed out, and she changed.

Gone was all frivolity, and uncertainty. Here now was a woman who could cut the world in half and felt no sympathy for its survivors. Erick almost took another half step back. Teressa went on edge, but hers was a weak thing compared to Darabella’s; a butter knife compared to metaphysical molecular wire.

Darabella saw the sword. She touched the bladed tip with a finger. The black adamantium shifted to white, and grey, and every monochrome color in between black and radiance. She pulled her finger back, and smiled a predatory grin as the sword calmed down to dull illusions.

With a deft flick, she opened a small compartment on the side of the white stone table, exposing a black adamantium knife that seemed ancient with power. And then the knife was in her hands; she had not moved to pick it up, and it had not flown to her grip. The knife was simply where it was supposed to be; in her grip.

Together, Rune Smith and her knife became one complete entity of cutting horizons. Darabella’s edges became cut-glass rainbows, while her hand became a monochromatic dance of light and shadows, narrowed to a single, glorious point.

Darabella and Jane’s sword were still the only two things of notice in the entire room, but while one was perfect in her delineation, the other was a poor facsimile of a Truth. So Darabella worked on fixing that discrepancy of what was, turning it into what should be.

She carved runes of power into one side of the black blade, like the world’s most perfect calligrapher, her arms forever steady, her hands never not where they were supposed to be, her knife always carving away exactly what it was meant to carve. She revealed the jewel underneath a drab exterior.

[Flying Striker] appeared out of the deep grooves of the weapon. The sword creator’s original wording was completely obliterated by Darabella’s, as she shaped her perfect version of the world with her impeccable runes.

Then she added more designs, smaller than the original one, and quickly emplaced here and there as only a master Rune Smith knew how to do, flipping the sword over with the controls on the table as she needed. ‘Pierce’ went into the three sides of the weapon, near the tip. A hundred ‘Cut’s, in tiny, almost imperceptible Ancient Script, went down the length of fuller, near the edge, first on one side, and then on the other. A bevy of ‘Control’ and ‘Solid’ and ‘Swift’ and a bunch of other Ancient Script runes of which Darabella knew how to use, but which she had not explained to Erick, circled the hilt, transforming the solid surface into a grippable surface with spiraling, tiny words.

And then even more runes went into the weapon. A particularly strong-looking series of six runes circled around the base of the hilt; ‘Fire’, ‘Air’, ‘Light’, ‘Water’, ‘Stone’, ‘Shadow’. Followed by ‘Prismatic’ placed directly in a location of power directly on the end of the hilt itself.

A few more stray runes went into the working here and there, and then Darabella switched from carving runes to producing artistic swirls and flows, surreptitiously joining runes to each other in a flowing manner which Erick only sort of understood because he knew Jane’s desired outcome. Everything else he saw was easily understandable from there, for Jane wanted a sword that would work with every single Elemental Body she had, and she had all of them. The sword would let her borrow the adamantium’s indelible strength whenever she was air, or light, or prismatic, or anything else.

Darabella pulled back from the sword, her eyes scouring the weapon for faults and finding none.

Then she went back in, and with one final touch, ran her monochrome horizon across the edge at a shallow angle, imparting a small token of her own severe edge to the sword. And then she had the stone table flip the weapon over and she sharpened the other side.

Darabella pulled back and eyed her work, and was satisfied. She was done. She slipped her adamantium rune dagger back into the slot in the side of the stone table, and closed that drawer. The world seemed to linger on the edge of severity for one long moment, and then it was over. Darabella’s horizons vanished.

She sighed, as though she was picking her burdens back up, and perhaps she was, for she tiredly went over to the control mechanisms of the adamantium orbs, and flipped a few gears. The air calmed.

The moment of magic had passed.

Darabella smiled softly, breathing deep, and said, “You can talk now, and approach the table.” She walked back to the table with the sword, her exhaustion rapidly fading as she asked, “What do you think?”

“That. Was. Amazing!” Erick stepped to the weapon, saying, “That’s a heck of a lot more complicated than I would have thought!”

“Oh yeah.” Darabella said, “I like to do more than is necessary, than to find out after the fact I have not done enough, since Shifting Runes will allow for gradual optimization of all runic structures, and your daughter’s request was a lot more complicated than normal.” She gestured to the sword. “So let’s go over this. Here you have…”

They spoke for a good twenty minutes on the intricacies of the runic structure, going over the flow of the main runes, as well as the influencing runes which would bring about specific effects. Those influencing runes, the ‘cut’s and the ‘control’s, were new to Erick.

“I’m surprised that you got the edge so straight when you sharpened it, too.” Erick said, “That’s a master’s skill in itself.”

Darabella blushed as she smiled, her cheeks dimpling. “When you’ve sharpened as many swords as I have, then this much is expected.”

“I can see that, I suppose.” Erick asked, “How do you test it to see if it’s an artifact or not?” He smirked. “Am I going to have to pay the artifact price?”

Darabella blushed even more, laughing a little. “Even if it is an artifact, that’s fine. Don’t worry about that. But I don’t think it is; I didn’t feel the usual pull when I make an artifact. But if it should happen to turn into an artifact through use? Then that’s your good fortune— or your daughter’s I suppose. That happens sometimes.”

“Ah.” Erick said, “Okay.”

Darabella nodded, and went right along, saying, “But about the testing… Your daughter will have to use the weapon for a while, cycling through all of her Elemental Bodies as she does. She’ll have about a week of experimentation and tempering before my Greater Shifting Runes fades, so she’ll have to work the weapon as hard as she can during that time.”

“She’ll be thrilled, I am sure.”

Darabella asked, “Ready for your guard’s armor? This one should be easier.”

“Yes, please.” Erick said, “It’s amazing watching you work.”

Darabella gave a few small giggles as she picked the weapon off of the table and brought it back to the box, where she stuffed it back into the woodchips and closed the lid. Then she moved that box aside and grabbed the box with Poi’s armor set.

Poi’s runework required the adamantium orbs outside to be in a different configuration than they had been for the sword, bringing a tempered solidity to the air instead of an amplification of horizons, which was only a part of the difference of enacting this particular runework. The most major difference of this job, though, was the inclusion of joining runes between every single separate piece of armor, to allow Poi’s [Weightless Armor of Silent Reflections] spell to bridge the air gaps between armor pieces, ensuring that his spellwork imbued the entire shiny black thing, from the helmet, to the gauntlets, to the greaves, and everything between. Once it was fully imbued, it should turn fully silver, too; Poi would not be walking around in black armor in Spur, no way.

Other than that, the armor’s carving was a rather simple runic map that mostly took place on the interior of the breastplate.

When that was over, Darabella shifted the adamantium orbs to a neutral position, explaining how they were only necessary when carving adamantium, to make the impossibly hard metal more pliant to her touch.

They moved on to mage staff creation, as Darabella plucked an unadorned steel staff out of a box in another room. It was a simple four-sided thing that was thicker on one end and tapered to a flat bottom on the other; it was to be the staff of [Glowball]s.

After twenty minutes of Darabella carving into the steel staff with her wooden dagger, explaining everything she was putting into the working, the staff was done. Erick didn’t have the spell [Glowball] himself, but after Darabella explained what the spell was, exactly, Erick had little difficulty flowing mana through [Ward], but for lightwards, and [Force Bomb], to make the necessary spell. He showed off his own skills with making spells, and Darabella seemed to find that interesting too, in her own way.

The spell [Glowball] was rather unimpressive, but Erick supposed that it would be useful for conjuring a light into hostile hordes.

--

Glowball, instant, long range, 75 mana

Conjure a quick ball of mana that unfolds into a large light upon striking a surface. The light lasts for 24 hours.

--

After that, Erick could have stuck around for more lessons, but he saw the work piling up downstairs. It was time to go.

“Thank you, so much, Darabella.” Erick said, “This has been very enlightening.”

“I’ve had fun, too!” Darabella smiled brightly, almost going to ask him something, but she stopped, and turned away. She softly said, “Thanks for coming by.”

Erick latched on to the opportunity, saying, “They’re holding a banquet or something in a few days at the noble district, if I have that right. Would you like to go with me?”

Darabella brightened, but a shadow crossed her eyes. After a moment, Darabella said, “Yes. I would love to.”

Erick mentally took his paranoia out back and shot it in the head, and then he put on a happy face and said, “Then I will pick you up at the appropriate time… Wherever your home may be? Or from here?”

With a tight smile, Darabella asked, “Uh? Sure? I. Uh. Live down on Steel Street, across from the Church of Forgotten Light— Ah. Ha ha? You don’t really need directions though. You could find me wherever I went?”

Darabella’s expression was only superficially a smile.

Things had gotten very weird, very fast.

Erick brushed off his own concerns and tried to mitigate whatever might be going on with Darabella, saying, “If you don’t want to, that’s fine. I merely thought that—”

“I want to go with you to the banquet.” Darabella discarded her own inhibitions and spoke with calm authority, “Pick me up an hour before the event. I don’t know when the banquet is, but I’ll be sure to have at least ten different people remind me when it’s happening so that I can be ready. I haven’t been to a banquet in a long time though, Erick, so please forgive me for my oddities.”

Erick smiled softly, saying, “Then I will pick you up an hour before the event, Darabella.”

Darabella nodded, saying, “I look forward to the night, Erick— Oh! Wait. Uh.” She lost her edge again, going a bit scatterbrained as she said, “You’re leaving now then, yeah?”

Erick paused, feeling like he had been tossed from one side of the room to the other.

And then Darabella handed Erick the staff, saying, “Here. Take this. And the other stuff, too, of co— Oh!” She rushed to her desk, paused to look around, then she grabbed two small books from the shelves behind the desk. She handed those off to Erick. “Some books on runes. Bring them back when you’re done, and don’t forget your completed items! Tell me how they work out!”

“… Of course. Thanks again, Darabella.”

“See you later, Archma— Erick.”

…

Erick nodded.

Between Erick and Teressa and Ophiel they had more than enough hands to make light work of carrying the loot back to the rooms. Which is what they did.

Along the way out of the Smithy, Teressa smirked as she teased, ‘Good luck with that one, Boss.’

‘Ah… Thanks.’

- - - -

Erick stepped into his temporary home, calling out, “Jane! Sword! Poi! We got your—”

Jane was suddenly there, right in front of Erick in a flicker of shadows, trying to act calm while she was obviously very excited. She looked to the smaller crate held in Ophiel’s light, asking, “So. Uh. I see it’s ready.”

Erick smiled as he handed over the crate, saying, “I got to see Darabella rune it, and she says—”

With strong arms, Jane ripped off the cover of the box, spilling woodchips everywhere as she grabbed for the black sword inside. The box fell to the floor as she held her prize in her right hand. Her eyes shimmered with an almost primal love as she stared upon the cutting edge.

Erick picked up the removable hilt that had fallen to the floor and shoved the woodchips back into their box, continuing, “—You’ve got to cast your spells into it, and be sure to use all of your Elemental Bodies, too. It should soak in everything you give it, and since it was made with Greater Shifting Runes, then it will get a lot better for you, personally, with use. The Shifting Runes will only last a week though, so you have to use it well and true while you can make the most difference.”

He had been trying to hand Jane the hilt this whole time, but she was only now able to look down and spot the bit of metal in Erick’s hands. She took the slip-on hilt, and seemed to debate with herself about putting it on the sword, or not. She put it in her pocket, instead, and then she started swishing the black sword through the air, feeling the grip and adjusting her fingers, smiling all the while.

Erick continued, “Do be sure to use all of your abilities to their utmost for the next week. Also, I heard that they might be moving the tournament up to five days from now, so there’s a goal for you.”

Jane froze. Her smile vanished. She looked to her father, and asked, “Are they changing the tournament dates because of me?”

Erick froze. It seems he had stepped onto a landmine.

In retrospect, he should have thought of this possibility, for what Jane had guessed was likely very true.

… Whelp! Whatever! Landmines went off when they were stepped on, not when you took your foot off. This situation was well and truly blowing up at him so he might as well confront it head on.

Erick said, “They’re changing the dates because of me, which is likely because of you; yes.”

Teressa casually yet quickly walked away, carrying Poi’s boxed up armor to its owner, in the other room. On her way to Poi she casually nudged Nirzir back out of the hallway. The princess had poked her head out to see what was happening, but at being poked back, she almost took offense, but then she did not; Nirzir saw something was going down between Erick and Jane and she decided she did not need to be a part of that.

… But as moments ticked on, and Erick saw everything happening around him while he waited for his daughter to further react… Jane did nothing except stare into the middle distance. She wasn’t reading blue boxes. She was disassociating. She was probably just thinking.

And then she came back to herself. Jane looked to Erick, and asked, “Could you tell them to not change the dates for me, please?” She added, “I won’t be participating in their tournament, even if they make allowances for me. I couldn’t—” She breathed deep, then said, “I think… I need to carve out my own life, dad. And this… This vacation has been— It’s been all about you, and that’s fine. You’re doing wonderful things! You’re… Doing a lot. But changing the dates of a tournament for me…” Jane said, “I really don’t like that. I don’t think I could even show my face there, now that I know this. I… I need to do my own things.”

Erick took a moment, then he spoke the thoughts that had suddenly filled his mind, “So I’m being paranoid here, but while I don’t think Darabella or anyone else did anything to that sword you’re holding, I want you to remain for at least 5 more days, so I can be sure nothing odd is happening here. And then you can go do whatever you want.”

“Okay.” Jane said, “Then that is what I’ll do. I’m probably going to go to the Deep Underworld. Find some real monsters. Get to level 95.”

A sense of deep exasperation flowed through Erick, and he asked, “Why?”

“Because it’s the only place that is absolutely filled with problems that you cannot solve because the only way through most of the Underworld at all is with [Stone Body], and you don’t have that. We’re close to the main roads, too, and you’re not going to the Underworld yet, but I want to.” Jane said, “So that is what I’m going to do. I hear the Adventurer’s Guild has their old main offices a thousand kilometers off of the Core, almost directly below central Quintlan. That’ll be my goal. From there, there’s millions of people scattered in the dark in need of help, and I have the tools to help, so I will.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot, haven’t you.”

“Ever since I heard there was an Underworld, but moreso when we actually arrived here.” She added, “Besides… You don’t need me, dad. Not anymore.”

“I’ll always need you in my life, Jane.” Erick was hurt, and he had no idea how to express that hurt without hurting Jane in return. “But I understand that you need to be your own person.”

Jane said nothing.

Erick said, “If this [Gate] thing works out, then those old offices are going to get permanent [Gate]s, too. The main offices of the Adventuring Guild in Archipelago Nergal would get a Gate, as well.”

“I won’t be going away forever.” Jane said, “But... I can’t stand people changing to appease me, and I don’t want handouts. I can’t understand how you could be okay with any of this, either.” She said, holding her sword which she had only gotten due to Erick’s meddling.

But Erick wasn’t going to mention that to her; no way.

He stood there, not sure what to say, so he said nothing.

Jane continued, “Those women who flashed you on the street the other day? That’s… That’s not right. Do you know that I’ve been propositioned with millions of gold and marriages into dynasties and— And all so that people could talk to you.” She looked down at the sword in her hands, and her eyes went wide. “And I suppose I finally accepted one of those offers, didn’t I.” With eyes wider still, she said, “And I promised myself that I wouldn’t let you help me too much. This is too much, isn’t it?”

From one gift to a sudden breakdown in psyche. Erick really should have seen this coming, but… He did not expect this, either. Jane had seemed fine the past two days! Perfectly fine. Obviously, she was not.

Erick strongly said, “It’s not too much, because this world is dangerous, and everyone needs all the help they can get. Including me. Including you.” Erick stepped forward and took his daughter in his arms, hugging her tight, while Jane stood there unsure of anything, with one arm off to the side barely gripping her sword and the other almost scared to return the hug. Her eyes watered. Erick said, “Keep that in mind when you’re out there saving the world; you don’t have to go alone.”

Tears fell.

Jane whispered, “I want a Privacy, dad. I don’t like everyone seeing—”

Erick cast a [Sealed Privacy Ward] around them, locking them away from the eyes of the rest of the world.

Jane’s sword suddenly clattered to the ground as she wrapped both her arms around her father, returning his embrace. Tears flowed, for there was no more cares about loss of face.

As his own tears fell, Erick forced a smile and tried out a joke, “You’ve already cried in front of everyone at Hothalls, so this is nothing compared to that public embarrassment.”

Jane barked out a laugh as she cried, and hugged tighter. She sighed, expelling most of her pain, then she said, “Everyone bends over backwards for me and for you. I can’t trust anyone after they learn who I am.” Then she stopped crying, and pulled away; Erick let her go. “I want to talk about some stuff, dad. Let’s… Go to the living room, instead of the hallway.”

“Sure.” Erick picked up Jane’s sword with a wave of his light. He handed it to her, teasing, “You should take care of your new weapon; you don’t want to lose the edge!”

Jane smirked, rubbing her puffy face with one hand as she grabbed the sword with the other. “If a simple drop to the floor ruins the edge of a near-indestructible sword, then I think we have more problems than a lack of proper sword etiquette.”

They relocated to an empty side room with a small bookshelf and a pair of chairs with a small table between them. Erick relocated the Privacy, too, with a recast.

Jane dragged up a painful past, saying, “Remember that orcol guy back at Treehome?”

“… I do.” Erick flushed with worry, and then with resolve. “Do I need to add another person to my body count?”

Jane’s eyes went wide, and then she chuckled, rapidly turning into a full blown laugh.

Erick spoke over her laugh, “I’m serious.” And he was; Paranoia was hitting hard today, it seemed. “What was his name? Kordon?”

“That’s him.” Jane smiled, saying, “And no. You’re not killing him. But thank you for the offer.”

Erick found himself involuntarily shuddering out a ragged breath, rapidly saying, “Oh good gods. I did not want to have to do that.”

Jane smirked, saying, “Kordon was… He was a great guy. We… Had relations, and then he decided that he could be rich if he was with me because you would always have money. I almost gutted him right then and there but Kordon played it off as a joke, though I knew it was him testing the waters. The same thing almost happened in Songli after you were outed— Or you outed yourself, I guess. Three times, it happened; three different propositions, each totally genuine. Not to mention all the ones that I’d rather not discuss.

“I had to be diplomatic about the one guy because he was Nirzir’s brother.” She said, “I get that you’re some… World power, now. And that’s fucking weird as all fucking hell. But I can get behind it. But everything else about that— All the attendant responsibilities that I’ve read in stories about noblesse oblige and marrying for power and cementing alliances? Intellectually, I understand that that is how this type of thing works, but emotionally... It’s fucking me up, dad. Though I love you, and what you’ve done, I do not like that this is my life now.” She said, “I think the worst part is that I can’t enjoy any of it because I know that I didn’t earn a single bit of it.”

Erick listened, and then he said, “I’m sorry it didn’t work out with Kordon.”

Jane waved him off and brushed away a sudden tear, saying, “It was never going to work with that asshole. He even said to me— Before we were together— He said to me ‘You’re a fucking princess!’ and that I couldn’t have defeated him in a fair fight without all the artifacts I was wearing. And I was wearing artifacts.” She held up her hands, showing her rings. “Two of them!” She cursed, “Gods! I don’t know what the fuck I saw in that guy. At least you managed to find a good one, but Linxel didn’t work out, either?”

“Different lives. Different sides of the globe. Amicable split.”

“Amicable is about all you can hope for, I guess.”

Erick smiled softly. “This is true, Jane.”

Jane frowned at herself. “Least your relationships have been because the people wanted you, right? Or was Linxel a leech, too?”

And here came the uncomfortableness.

Erick had raised Jane on his own, and because of that, they had talked about every topic under the sun, including topics that Erick had found himself (on a bad day) wishing that Jane had her mother to talk to instead. He hadn’t had a bad day like that in a very long time, though. Erick was there for Jane, for whatever she needed. He was actually thrilled that she still spoke about her love life with him, if only to know that she was okay, and that she was making correct decisions.

Though right now, in this space, they were talking about relationships in general, and that included his own relationships. That was the only truly uncomfortable part of this talk, so Erick took a moment to consider how much to tell Jane about his own current love life and prospects.

This was not the first time they had had this discussion. For Jane, this was a topic that was rather explosive when handled incorrectly, because Jane would love to have a second father, and she even encouraged Erick dating men...

But Jane did not want another mother in her life. Never again. Never, ever again.

And yet, none of that was Jane’s decision to make.

“Linxel was nice. Not going to happen, though. Too many responsibilities elsewhere and neither of us were willing to have a long distance relationship.” Erick said, “But I am going on a date with Darabella to the banquet in a few days.”

Jane instantly said, “She only wants your power and money.”

Erick was ready for this, though, so he sarcastically gestured at himself with both of his hands, saying, “I have a lot to offer, here!”

“Yes.” Jane said, “And you deserve someone who doesn’t look at you like you are a trophy to own.”

Erick smirked. “Come on now, Jane. If anyone is winning prizes around here, it’s me.”

“First: Gross. Second: that’s another problem.” Jane said, “Half the people see me as a prize to win, but the other half see themselves as trophies that I should be proud to have waiting for them back home. And I’m not sure what to do with that. Like. I obviously cannot participate in such a system. But at the same time… Marrying for love is apparently something only ‘idiot commoners’ do; according to everyone back at Songli. Apparently it’s expected that…” She frowned, then she decided to just come out and say, “It’s expected that I forge bonds of strong matrimony with some power out there, to help cement the changes you’ve carved into this world.”

Jane wasn’t comfortable talking about Darabella; this was fine. Erick went along with whatever she wanted to talk about, instead.

He asked, “How many people propositioned you? Exactly? You said three, but… It was obviously a lot more than that.”

“It was about 15, I think.” Jane said, “The only one that was a serious concern was Nirzir’s brother, Keziro. He’s not a bad guy, but… He spoke very clearly that there was a path of marriage open to me, through him, and that I would be expected to treat the marriage like a proper business arrangement and to be involved in the politics of the Highlands. Or I could join the monster kill squads and live a separate life from him, but it would be expected that I spawned some children for him.”

Erick was vaguely more flummoxed than mad, but he was getting to that second emotion quick enough. “And Keziro simply came out and asked you for marriage, like that?”

“Well. No.” Jane faltered, then said, “When it became clear I wasn’t reciprocating his advances and that I had no idea what he was actually aiming for… All the nearby servants were all weird about it, too, so I—” She paused. She said, “He asked if he could speak openly, and I said yes, and then he did, and then…” She said, “It was a calm, rational discussion of the mechanics of marriage, that I knew nothing about until he told me. And it freaked me out too much to even think about it until now.”

Anger flowed away.

Erick said, “Well… Then he seems like a decent guy?”

“He is. But.” Jane said, “I can’t do this ‘marrying houses together thing’. I’m not ready. And I didn’t even earn it myself!”

Erick said, “Which is why you need to leave and make it on your own.”

Jane sat there, silent, staring at the space on the wall down in front of her. Then she looked to her father, and said, “Yes.”

Erick nodded. Then he spoke some harsh truths, “You talk about the world conspiring to force you into a marriage based on power that is not your own, and you talk of escaping all of that, but you know you can’t. I can’t ever escape it, either. I’m half-convinced that when I asked Darabella out to the banquet that she didn’t actually want to go, even with all the signals she was sending me before I asked her. Maybe she forced herself to say ‘yes’, but if she forces herself to say any other ‘yes’s, then I’m calling the whole thing off. Or I could be wrong! I don’t know. I’ll ask her if and when I need to ask her. But I’m fully convinced that Linxel was too horny to think straight and then afterwards he realized what he was inviting into his life, so he ducked out of a possible relationship as fast as he could.” He said, “The fact is, that what I did in Ar’Kendrithyst and what I’m doing out here is changing a lot, for both of us, because both of us have our own power—”

Jane scoffed.

“—Yes. Both of us are strong, Jane. You’re incredibly strong. You’ll find your own way soon enough. But I gotta say, and I know it’s gonna hurt, but you gotta get over this aversion you have to the power I can give you and help you achieve, because I have enemies, and if they’re not coming after me, then they’re going after you to get to me; just as in marriage, they also come with daggers bared, and I’m scared of all of those possible angles of attack.” He said, “The soul spear attack you told me about, the one Melemizargo saved you from? That’s the only one that I know about, but I’m not dumb enough to think that there haven’t been others.”

Jane breathed out, looking like she was preparing for a lie, then she decided to tell the truth. “There have been others. And I’ve lived through them all.”

Erick clamped down on his sudden panic. Intellectually, he knew there had been other attempts, but to hear it actually confirmed was a bit tilting. He said, “Okay.” He continued, “So there you go. Now knowing that you’re the daughter of one of Veird’s strongest archmages, I want you to take that sword that you have been granted because you’re the daughter of someone of power, and use it well to defend yourself from all the horrors that are coming after you, to get to me. It’s the perfect weapon for you, built to your specifications, so you know more about it than I do. So use it well. And, because there is no such thing as too much defense, I want you to think about getting a New Stat. I can offer you any of them, but not all of them— Or? You still have that belt, too, don’t you?”

Jane took a moment of thought to line up her words. She said, “The belt is locked up in a vault. I won’t be using it.”

“Probably for the best. My Status still says ‘Human-question-mark’. Everyone else with multiple New Stats turned shadeling.”

Jane said, “Except those who already knew the Truth of Melemizargo.”

“I don’t want you to take that chance, and I don’t think you want to take that chance, either. You’re deflecting the conversation to get away from my point: that you need more power to live freely, and you need to take it from every safe source you can get it, and that fact is eating away at your self esteem.”

Jane frowned at her father, but there was no heat to her look. Erick had hit the nail on the head.

Erick waited.

Jane sighed, and asked, “Did you learn some Mind Magic, or something?”

“No. But it feels like it, sometimes. I certainly don’t see the world how I used to.” Erick continued, “Intelligence is the risky option. Dexterity and Constitution are the safe options; one for giving your body all the resources it could ever need, while the other for ensuring that you have a blanket defensive layer active at all times. Perception is the odd one out; it certainly lets you see a great deal more of the world, though.”

“… Maybe Dexterity. Or Perception. Probably Perception; I’m not sure.” Jane said, “I’m still going to be here for a few days more, anyway. At least till the banquet, so that I can see this woman—” She sighed. “This ‘Darabella’, with my own eyes.”

Erick nodded. “That’s fine.” He stood, spreading his arms wide.

Jane sighed as she followed his lead, and came in for a hug.

“I love you, Jane,” Erick said, over her shoulder. “Anything you want to do, I’ll support you. Any life you want to live, I’m there for you. And because of the events of recent history, I’ll add: If you happen to get involved in a war, be sure that it’s a good war, because I will likely get involved at that point in time.”

Jane hugged her father tighter, chuckling a little. “It’s amazing to hear you say that.”

“I’m serious, too. Every word. If someone hurts you… Well. I’ll let you handle it, first, and then I’ll get involved.”

“… Thank you.” Jane said, “I love you, too, dad.”

“Now how about we take a trip to the surface and you can try out your sword and I can try out my staff.” Erick released his grip a bit. “And everyone else can use their own new toys, too.”

Jane pulled away, asking, “What’s up with the staff, anyway?”

“It’s basically a way to hand off a thousand spells to an item, and then you can trigger the item to release those spells later, as though you had cast them yourself.”

Jane’s eyes went wide. “Oh!”

“Oh, indeed.” Erick smirked. “I think I’m really going to like runework.”

“Make me a bracelet that holds charms, dad.”

“Oh! That’s a good idea.” Erick smiled, saying, “Permanent Charms bracelet!”

“Wait? Permanent?” Jane’s eyes went wide. “Like in ‘artifact’ permanent?”

“The better made ones; yes. That is a possibility! If you use your new sword well enough in the next week, then Darabella said it could possibly turn into an artifact, too.”

Jane’s face broke into a wide, giggling smile.

- - - -

After his talk with Jane, Erick briefly informed Poi that a few messages needed to go out, and would he do those, please. Mainly, Erick did not want them to change the date of the tournament because of his presence. Neither he, nor Jane, would be attending.

Poi did so.

- - - -

In the snow-filled mountains of the Northern Tribulations, where the peaks were fifty kilometers higher than the valleys, Erick and his people appeared in a flash of light upon a relatively barren, flat part of the land. The ground only had a small layer of snow upon it while it was rocky and barren for a good kilometer in every direction; more than enough space to practice spellwork and to come to an understanding about the new tools and weapons four out of the five people now had.

The fifth person, Nirzir, only had her formation dagger, but now she also had Erick’s gifted books of runes. While Jane had taken but ten minutes to flip through them and declare she had no idea what it all meant, Nirzir had rapidly inserted herself into the situation, asking questions about the books. Soon enough, Jane had handed over the books to Nirzir, who was comparing the rune books to her own ideas of formation carving.

Nirzir was very interested in runework, apparently, so that’s what she came out to the mountain to study.

Erick cast a few spells across the mountainside to make their surroundings more comfortable, to give them a spot to rest after tiring themselves out from swinging new swords or shields or walking in new armor, and otherwise. Not a minute after landing, Nirzir sat upon a conjured chair in a windbreak, reading the rune books and sipping hot tea. The princess had shown a passing interest in the staff, but she was more interested in how it was made, and not the actual item. Erick had already flipped through the books and found he was able to recall most of what was in them, so it was on to experimenting for him. He’d read them all, in depth, later, but he knew more than enough to begin casting spells.

And now that some time had passed since his introductions to proper runework, and the ideas of runes had percolated in his mind, Erick was especially eager to test out the idea of an [Intent Understanding] rune, alongside Tricking Magic, to make a runic system that would accept any mana and output real spellwork, like his own [Prismatic Ward]. Or more realistically, perhaps the Solid Ward that Erick used to have; [Crystalline Air] was much less complicated than [Prismatic Ward], after all. Erick had no idea how to iron out the problems of permissions, to allow people to pass through the [Crystalline Air], but perhaps more Tricking Magic could account for that?

… Anyway. That would come later. For now, came testing with his new staff.

Hmm. Except.

The valley was large enough to fit half of Ar’Kendrithyst inside, with the other side of the valley completely occluded by snow, and shadows. It was cold and windy. Somewhere to the northeast, south, and west, rose three mountain peaks, though Erick only knew where they were based on Ophiel’s flights through the area.

No one else seemed to care about all the snow, though. There was Jane, already slashing through snow with a sword on fire, and then adding a second slash with a sword made of shadows. Poi trudged through dense snowdrifts, moving in his armor; that had to be cold, right? Teressa flung her flying shield through the air, creating minor waves of wind that brushed back huge swaths of falling white.

But Erick looked to the snowy sky, and said, “That’s less than ideal.”

So he cast a spell.

Within minutes, the sky stopped snowing. The sun came out. The grey world parted, revealing deep blue heavens, and a ten-kilometer wide glacier filling up most of the valley’s bottom. [Weather Control] would likely not last long, since this land was almost permanently snowing, but it would last long enough for some proper, full vision experiments.

Jane, Poi, and Teressa all stopped what they were doing. They looked to Erick.

Poi said, “It wasn’t necessary to do that.”

“Bad weather conditions are expected in battle, boss!” Teressa said.

Erick smiled. “Not with me, they’re not!”

Nirzir stared at the cleared sky, her mouth hanging open a bit as she flicked her attention back and forth between Erick and the blue heavens, her eyes full of disbelief.

Erick asked her, “What? You knew I could do this.”

“… Knowing and seeing are two different things,” Nirzir said, as she rapidly went back to reading her borrowed books.

Soon, everyone was back to practicing whatever they wished to practice.

And Erick picked up his staff. It was four-sided with a slightly tapered base and a sheered top, sliced off to make an exit point for the magic within. Runes had been carved all up and down the four sides, and upon the cut top. Erick stared at the runes for a bit, in the light of the glinting sun, studying the flows and the joinings, trying to understand them more than he already had. He didn’t spend too much time doing that, for he knew he was not going to gain any new insights through just looking. So he kept his mana sense wide open, and he cast the first [Glowball] into the steel.

The runes did not change. The staff did not glow. This much was normal, for the staff was designed to hold onto the spell until it was purposefully released.

Which is what he did next.

Erick held the staff aloft and willed a [Force Bolt] into the trigger rune, and then another.

Two things happened.

One: A double [Force Bolt] flew out of the head of the staff and impacted the shadow-strewn land, far away from everyone else.

And Two: A bright ball of harmless light, a handspan across, flew out of the head of the staff and struck the same spot the [Force Bolt] had hit. The [Glowball] expanded into a large space of white light and settled down into its new space. If the staff had been made correctly, then the [Glowball] should last 24 hours; the same duration as a [Ward].

The [Force Bolt] trigger runes had deactivated fully; their triggering charge spent.

Erick nodded. The staff’s modified style had worked exactly as intended.

Moving right along, Erick fed two [Glowball]s into the staff, and then rapidly triggered the staff again. This time he aimed a bit to the right of the first experiment. When the second [Glowball] exploded into a lightward, the resulting sphere was nearly twice as large as the first one.

Erick raised an eyebrow. The effects of stacked spellwork in runes were exactly as Darabella had described them. Interesting.

A 5-imbue [Glowball] was much, much larger than the doubled [Glowball], but it was not super large size. Like Darabella had explained, the increased-area-effect experienced a harsh drop off past 3 imbues, so 5 imbues was beginning to hit that limit rather hard. That was why the staff was only allowed to discharge 5 charges at once; any more than that would be a waste of charge.

This [Glowball] staff wasn’t even made with the intention of utilizing the increased AOE effect. Once it was fully charged with a thousand charges, that entire aspect of runework would mitigate down to nothing.

Good news, though, and the reason for allowing 5 charges to go off at once, was that the light of the 5-charge [Glowball] was about 5 times as intense. Nothing wrong with that aspect of runework, either. Being inside the conjured sphere of brilliance would not actually inflict the Blind status, but it sort of did, anyway, for all those without eye protection. As it was, it was hard for Erick to look upon the resulting brilliant sphere without squinting, or without using his sunform to preserve his vision.

Everything was looking good, though.

Staff was working great!

Erick smiled as he held onto the metal staff, saying, “Not bad for a hunk of unenchanted steel!”

Nirzir flipped through the books to try and understand what Erick was doing. She said nothing as she read and cross-referenced the runes that she knew were on the staff. Jane didn’t seem to care about the magic staff, but she did turn her body away from the bright lights. Erick saw her ducking down into the shadows cast upon the mountainside by the [Glowball]s, though. Poi, meanwhile, had moved on to testing out his own flight spells, and it was not going well. He was trying not to falter out of the air. He was still getting the hang of his new armor’s reflective effects.

Teressa stood behind Erick, though, having finished with her own brief experiments; her shield floating at her back. She said, “Pretty, boss, but I still want to be able to see with my eyes. Can I get one of those ‘polarizing glasses’?”

Erick smiled. He Shaped some stone from the mountain below and conjured a polarizing wardlight upon them. He handed them over, saying, “Here you go.”

“Thanks.” Teressa briefly dismissed her conjured helmet, put on the glasses, and said, “Much better!” as she reconjured her full face helmet.

“Now for the strength test,” Erick said, holding the staff outward.

He rapidly fed another hundred [Glowball]s into the steel, taking a hundred seconds to do so, watching as his spellwork flowed into the steel like water into a dry sponge. A very dry sponge. Even with his mana sense wide open, it seemed impossible to see the magic that he was pouring into the thing.

[Mana Sight] did reveal a slight glimmer of magic inside the metal.

Erick wondered if leaving a staff filled with magic for long enough would turn the metal into wrought-quality, but he shoved that question to the side, for now; he’d ask someone about that later.

Around [Glowball] 310, though, there was a visual change in the staff. The head of the staff was cleaved along a 45 degree angle, and in the center of that face there was a spot with the rune ‘Escape’ circling a divot and a raised point in the steel, looking like a mountain with a moat around it. The ‘Escape’ runes were linked to a subset of runes that ran down the main tracks, like sidewalks to a roadway, to the space where the [Force Bolt] triggering runes were located. It was upon the head of the staff, in that pointed divot, that the change occurred; there was a tiny mana glow in that moat. It was white, and nearly invisible to the naked eye. But it was there.

Erick kept charging the staff with [Glowball]s.

Around cast 765, there was another change, much more drastic than the first. Every single rune began to glow a bit to Erick’s mana sense, like they were small, glowing white streams at the bottoms of valleys. Only the deepest runes had this shift. Mostly [Glowball] itself, which was carved in quadruplicate upon the four sides of the staff, but also in some of the connecting runelines here and there.

The [Force Bolt] releasing runes remained empty, though; by design, and by imbuement.

Erick stopped filling the staff.

He held it aloft, and said, “Fire in the hole!”

A brilliant spark, but no larger than the first 5-imbue spark, sailed out of the head of the staff and impacted a spot up the mountain, where it blossomed into a double-large area of brilliance. It was not nearly as large as the initial 5-[Glowball] use.

“Hmm.” Erick said, “The size increasing effect diminishes rather quickly under saturated-runework conditions. I expected the area of effect to remain larger for a while longer, but apparently not.” He hummed again, then said, “Still! A lot of applications here! Grand-type spells of all kinds are only the most obvious usage.” He handed the staff off to Teressa. “Go ahead and try. Imbue a [Force Bolt] into any part of the staff, but mainly this part here, near where you hold it.”

Suddenly afraid, Teressa tentatively took the staff. She looked at the little thing, then asked, “What do you mean… ‘imbue’, exactly?”

“It’s sort of like casting, but more like bringing the spell to the surface of yourself and then letting it flow into the staff.”

Teressa frowned. “To the surface of my aura?”

“Doesn’t have to be. But sure? Try that? It’s only a [Force Bolt] anyway. Not like you could break the staff if you accidentally cast the spell.”

Erick hoped, anyway.

Teressa cast [Force Bolt] into the staff causing grey light to briefly spack between her hand and the steel. Flickers of broken grey mana filtered out of her grip. With a nervous look, she held the staff away from herself, saying, “Uhhhhh.”

Erick said, “Try again. Even if it explodes, it’s [Glowball]; what’s the worst it could do.”

Hopefully nothing!

“Terrible thing to say, boss,” Teressa said, as she tried again.

More broken grey light.

No explosions yet!

Erick said, “Flow your spell more. Less of a cast.”

Third time was the charm, as [Force Bolt] went into the staff, and a [Glowball] and [Force Bolt] came out of the top. Both flew straight up, without much apparent direction. The Bolt dissipated, while the ball exploded a little over a hundred meters away, becoming yet another bright beacon in the very, very massive valley.

“There you go!” Erick cheered, “You got it!”

Teressa giggled a bit as she pointed the staff in another direction and imbued another [Force Bolt]. This time, the five-strength [Glowball] came out of the top and went into the air at an angle different from where it was pointing.

Erick said, “Try imbuing [Force Bolt] as though you were going to cast at a target, while picking that target. That’s how you make the [Glowball] impact a target.”

Teressa nodded. Soon, she was launching 375 mana spells all across the nearby mountainside for a mere 5 mana apiece. It was quite good efficiency, for sure.

Erick inwardly lamented all the time he had wasted on normal enchanting. Runework made a lot more sense to him than all of that other junk. Erick could only wonder at the historical reasons that runework never made it mainstream.

He’d ask around about that, later, too.

Teressa said, “This is a lot different than using my shield.”

“There are nuances everywhere.” Erick said, “All variations of [Conjure Weapon] and [Conjure Armor] soak into runework on their respective items a lot easier than mage spells. This type of magic takes some different kinds of finesse. Not sure why.” He shrugged, not knowing the true answer.

Teressa handed back the staff and brought her shield back around, saying, “Whatever the case...” With a flicker of magic, the shield started to fly in front of her shield arm. She smiled. “You helped me with this imbuement, too. That was a lot easier this time. Though...” She glanced over to Poi.

The man was desperately trying not to fall down in midair as he floated there, a mere meter off of the ground. One silver-clad leg slipped out of control, briefly, going wide and almost forcing Poi into a split, before he slammed his legs back together, to stand tall, yet slightly tilting. His armor glinted in the light, and if not for his terrible control and odd angle, he would be an impressive sight. It was quite beautiful armor.

Poi called out, “I’m fine!”

Erick called back, “No you’re not!” He started walking toward the man, saying, “Let me help.” He wasn’t sure how to help, but he could try.

Poi said, “I’m getting iiiaaaa—” He rapidly spun half a turn, ending upside down and slightly rotating. “… I could use help.”

Erick smiled. “We need to get you an Elemental Body, Poi. You too, Teressa. That can be our next step; Oceanside. I’ve put it off for long enough.” Jane was right; he wasn’t going to the Underworld yet, anyway, and maybe not for a while. Erick walked over and stood next to Poi, saying, “But let’s fix this flying issue first, shall we?”

Poi sighed.

Erick asked, “You used to have a point-movement flying [Personal Ward], didn’t you?”

“… I still do, but this armor interferes with it. I’m going to need a new flying spell because I am not getting rid of this armor.”

“At least the armor is shiny silver with your spell active.” Erick helped Poi to right himself, and to stand upon the ground, as he said, “They got that part right.”

“I’m very glad they did, otherwise I couldn’t wear it.” Poi said, “Regulations, and all.”

Erick teased, “And those regulations don’t apply to Killzone, I take it.”

“Nope.” Teressa happily said, “He made the regulations. Great big exception under that reg with his name on it, too.”

“We need to get you a new flying spell, Poi. At least until we get you an Elemental Body, and then a Greater Elemental Body.” Erick asked, “How about an aura? [Flight of a Thousand Hands] was pretty great!”

Poi frowned at himself. “Not that one.”

“My [Force Platforms] is pretty nice.” Teressa said, “Easy to make, too.” To demonstrate, she stepped into the air and a platform of Force coalesced directly under her foot. “Great for positioning.”

“No no…” Poi’s voice trailed off, as if he was thinking about Teressa’s flight spell, but not willing to commit in that direction; Not yet, anyway.

The conversation moved on from there, with Nirzir getting involved. And then Jane. Erick refrained from asking if Poi couldn’t ‘raid the Mind Mage collective’ for a good spell, for if it was that easy, then Poi would have done it. Instead, Erick spoke of all the other flying spells he knew of. But then Nirzir asked that exact question in Erick’s stead.

“Why can’t you ask your Mind Mage people for the best spell for you?” Nirzir asked.

Without rancor or any sort of emotional response, Poi simply said, “We don’t raid minds for magic, either for ourselves or for others, and that includes sharing what we happen to overhear with other Mind Mages. That’s not something we do.”

With a bit of surprise, Erick said, “Not even sharing? That seems near impossible, though?” Considering that, from what Erick had seen, every Mind Mage was always talking to each other all the time. Add to that the fact that Poi knew how Erick made magic, and that Poi had also been there for all the times when Erick was at Oceanside, or elsewhere... Why was Poi having difficulty with magic at all? Shouldn’t a Mind Mage be the strongest possible mage, if knowledge was all it took to make magic?

As soon as Erick had that thought, he returned to his original thought: if it was that easy, then Poi would be able to do it that easily.

With a little bit of annoyance, Poi said, “Magical influences that lead to properly made magic are like medicine; the right amount helps you to make yourself better than you were before, but too much becomes poison. Finding your own Truth is an inoculation against overdose, though.” He said, “I have my own Truth, and it has nothing to do with this kind of magic… So this is a bit difficult for me.”

Erick hummed, and nodded; he had never heard Poi say anything like this before, but it made sense. Had Jane ever heard this, though? She probably had, right? She went around talking to everyone about how to make magic before, to try and counteract her own troubles with the discipline.

Jane said, “That still doesn’t seem right to me.”

Ah. Apparently she had.

“It’s as ‘right’ now as it was the first time I told you,” Poi said. “But believe what you will.”

Erick offered, “I’d be glad to help you make a new [Fly] spell if you want help, Poi.”

“Maybe later.” Poi held out a hand, and his armor effortlessly moved with him. He tested the joints, saying, “I’m still getting the fit of this armor, itself, but I doubt I’ll ever wear anything else, ever again. This feels marvelous.”

Erick smiled wide. “I’m glad you like it.”

“I could use your help, Erick.” Nirzir asked, “If you’re willing?”

“Sure! I can do that.”

Jane, Poi, and Teressa went back to experimenting with their new adamantium armaments, while Erick went with Nirzir to talk of runes and formations and all that. Erick expected her to try making her new spell, but Nirzir explained that according to what she was reading in the books, she could do much better if she included some proper runes in the functionality. A great many of the principles of runes and Singing were the same, since both were all about communicating with the mana, asking for a specific outcome, so she needed to learn a bit more about runes before she continued; the answers to her questions were all here, if only she knew what it all meant.

Nirzir said, “The only difference is that Songs are varied things, and Ancient Script is set. And yet Ancient Script was purposefully created —we believe, the gods are silent about the Script— Ancient Script was created so that it is easy to conjure rhyme and rhythm, and that meter came naturally. So, in this way, it is very easy for Songs and runes to be related.” She gestured to the staff of [Glowball]s saying, “You might not have noticed it, but that thing reads like a five-way child’s rhyme, with the fifth, the [Force Bolt] extraction, being an outlet for the force of the building song. Sort of like a drum beat.”

Erick blinked a bit, then he looked at the staff again. It took him a moment, but he got there. “… Oh. I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m not sure if Miss Darabella knows that she made a child’s song, or if the comparison is only superficial, but it’s there, and I want to understand why it is there.”

“That reminds me.” Erick said, “The first time I ever saw anyone enchant, it was a man imbuing [Blink] into a wand. He used an enchanting spell, a small rhyme, and a formation of small cores to make the item.” He added, “The enchanter failed the first time, but they got it the second time. Ended up with a bunch of markings and scattered core dust inside the wand. The metal item was magical, but I never quite understood the outcome, or how the wand creation actually worked— Well. I understood enough to make a wand of [Blink] with about a 10% success rate, but… I bet I could make a runic wand of [Blink] with a much higher success rate.”

Nirzir nodded, saying, “I’ve done a little bit with carving channels and laying down dust, too, of course. My success rate is rather low, though. Enchanting was never impressive to me, since it all decays so darn fast. But this!” She held the runic book, saying, “This is impressive. It’s easy to see how all of this was the precursor to modern day enchanting, too. A lot of the principles here are the same, including using rhymes and sounds to create an item. I think— and I might be wrong, here!— But I think core dust is used in modern day enchanting simply so that the end-user doesn’t have to have the spellwork themselves.”

“Oh yeah.” Erick said, “I can easily see that being the case. Maybe, in the past, they needed to give magical items out to people who did not have the spellwork to utilize runic weapons, so they tried to solve that particular problem in three ways. One, they didn’t solve the problem and they told people to get better, with higher levels and better spellwork, but this solution obviously does not work when most populations are under level 20. Two, they threw core dust at the runic weapons, and modified the runic structures to better fit the dust, which would allow any end user to use the magic item, leading to the magic item markets we have these days.” Erick could have talked about planned obsolescence, but he chose not to. “Or three, the failed path, which was to make runic weapons that anyone could imbue with any type of mana to use the runework to cast larger or more intricate spells than most individuals knew. Darabella said there are a few ancient examples of that third type of runework in the noble district, but they’re more novelties than useful items, since the ratio of mana in to spellwork out is a thousand mana to one.”

Nirzir stared for a moment. Then she said, “I can see the first two happening and desire to create the third… But that third one. That would have changed everything, wouldn’t it? It sounds like [Renew].”

Erick smiled. “It does, doesn’t it.”

“So why couldn’t they fix the problems and make runic [Renew] work properly?” Nirzir asked. “Surely you’re not the first person with enough vision to see the possible outcomes of a properly made runic web. I’ve only learned of this stuff in the last few days and I can already see how it could change the world for the better.” Nirzir said, “Even forgetting all of that, and focusing on what is actually possible: a basic runic web around the nation would enable us to spread the Void Song to all parts of Songli! I can’t understand how I didn’t know about this before today!”

Erick chose to focus on the first part of Nirzir’s words, as she said, “In my experience, there’s usually only a handful of answers to that. Either this type of runework is not possible. Or maybe they noticed no improvements to their thousand-to-one ratio after a hundred years of hard study. Or maybe there’s something or someone lurking about, incentivizing the non-discovery of a runic [Renew]. Or maybe someone did master a runic [Renew], and they were killed for any number of reasons.”

Nirzir instantly shut down like she had seen an impossible danger loom in the shadows.

Good.

She had understood.

After a moment of introspective silence, Nirzir said, “The Shadows are gone now, though.”

Erick nodded, then said, “Shadows are only the first problem. You still got Hunters, or the sects of Nelboor. Face Stealers. Normal political intrigue. Nobles being allowed to murder anyone they want because the law says so. Normal monetary bullying. Commoners not being allowed to own their own breakthroughs. People needing to spend their mana making a living, instead of making magical breakthroughs. A million tiny problems of normal life, or even the desire not to make waves holding people back from doing more than what they usually do. Simple accidents in the lab ruining the work of months and thousands upon thousands of gold. Not all are solvable, but you can solve a few of them, so choose your battles.”

Nirzir stared off into the distance, thinking.

- - - -

Erick did not spend the next day at the Smithy, working with metal, like he expected to. Instead, he took a deep dive into the world of runes, learning what they could and could not do. The books from Darabella were only the start. There were rudimentary runic readers and even small classes held by prospective Rune Smiths scattered all around the city. Ophiels casually stationed themselves here and there to let Erick observe through the light and through his mana sense. He also had another session with Grosgrena to answer a few more rune questions, and he also spoke to the other Rune Scribes of the Smith, just so he could get some second opinions.

But mostly, he practiced carving, he tried calligraphy, he was good at it, likely due in no small part because of Dexterity and Perception.

And he learned.

Because, for the first time since Erick tried putting anything more than manalight into a piece of glass, enchanting made sense. Runic letters and simple communication with the mana, instead of a demand of the mana (which was what normal enchanting now felt like to him), made all the difference!

Words went into steel creating a rod which held a thousand [Force Bolts], and which released 10 at a time. But that wasn’t even the most impressive part of the rod. Since [Prestidigitation] was a 10 mana self-cast spell that stuck around for an hour, and which allowed small magical effects to occur for 1 mana a pop, Erick was able to cast that spell on himself and tie the triggering mechanism for the 10 [Force Bolt]-release to a 1 mana use of [Prestidigitation]. It was a minor breakthrough that was only hinted at as possible in some of the books he read, but no one had managed to make it work, or if they had, then they hadn’t written it down in any of the books Erick had.

Runework was complicated. It was messy. Erick exploded himself a few times, there on the top of the tower which served as his temporary home. More than a few times, some stray [Force Bolt]s went careening out of the space, but they impacted [Force Wall]s that Erick had already set up to prevent catastrophe.

He made a staff of [Fireball]s, but his [Fireball]s were not the standard [Fireball]s.

--

Fireball, instant, long range, 100 MP

Launch a super quick ethereal missile of fire that explodes on contact or at the end of its path, creating a large tumult of cloying fire. Deals WIL damage then ignites everything touched, dealing 3x WIL damage per second for 25 seconds.

--

They were gods dammed [Fire Missiles] that, when singular, exploded into a willow-tree like firework, spreading sparking flames everywhere. But when Erick launched 10 at once? In a pseudo-[Grand Fireball]?

It was like releasing a carpet bomb.

He set the surface of a glacier on fire.

In what seemed like a daze of creation and tempering metal and stretching steel and inscribing runes and checking over his many, many diagrams he had made, a full day passed in the blink of an eye. Jane made sure he ate, while mostly going out and killing things with her new sword, and everyone checked in on him a few times, and he checked up on them, but mostly, he worked at a fantastically frenzied pace.

When Erick hadn’t left the house in a full 45 hours, or slept, someone from Enduring Forge came knocking at his door. Jalrock Slate, of House Slate, appeared as congenial and nice as the first time Erick saw the man.

Erick whipped open the door, and with a smile on his face, locked his real eyes on the visitor, saying, “Jalrock! Good to see you! Sorry I haven’t been out lately; been working on stuff. You need something? I expected to hear something about securing the Reset before now! Is this that?”

Jalrock reciprocated Erick’s good mood, though none of his mania, smiling wide, saying, “Nothing’s wrong, but we thought to inform you personally of a few minor events that have happened while you have been sequestered in study.”

“Ah. Okay! Sure.” Erick said, “Uh. Can you make it quick? I hate to be rude, but I am currently in the middle of something important.”

“Of course, of course.” Jalrock said, “The Reset has officially gone better than we could ever have imagined. The rats and crabs and various plants and fungi are taking over their biomes and providing a solid barrier to all the other monsters further down the tunnels. We were, and are, prepared for any of a hundred different possible failures, but we have also prevented those failures exactly as we hoped we could. The Reset has solidified. It should hold for several years before someone gets sloppy with the maintenance, for as it has happened before, it will happen again. The banquet to commemorate the success will be held in 12 hours.” Jalrock skipped right along, “The tournament will remain as it was previously scheduled, and we apologize for attempting to intrude upon your time with such an offer to move it.” He said, “And finally: Master Swordsmith Mordog has time for you now, if you wish to learn a bit about working with adamantium. He has a small pour of formation daggers to make, if you wish to see the process unfold.” As Erick’s eyes went wide, Jalrock said, “This last one is what officially brings me here. The pour will begin in an hour and end roughly half an hour after that.”

Erick’s desires tore in two different directions, but the opportunity to see an adamantium pour won out. He said, “I’ll be ready in five minutes.”

Jalrock smiled, then half bowed, saying, “I await your readiness.”

Erick turned back, calling out, “Poi! Are you a— Ah. Shit. Sleeping. Uh. Teressa…”

Poi grumbled back, “I’m awake now.”

Jalrock waited past the open door while Erick hustled and bustled to get ready.

While Poi grumbled a bit and got out of bed —He had 6 hours of sleep already! What was the problem!— Erick rapidly stowed his runework record player experiment back with all his other scattered experiments. Rods, wands, staffs, orbs. Small runic webs of a dozen separate rods and spheres. All of them were too interesting to let sit for any length of time, especially the runic records. Erick had high hopes for that, but he hadn’t gotten the records or the player to a workable state yet.

But watching an adamantium pour was the one thing that could tear Erick away from his work. He still hadn’t seen that, yet.

And so, he tore himself away from his work.

It was time to see how adamantium was made!

- - - -

Mordog, the massively muscular human-sized Swordsmith, along with a few trusted helpers, stood beside a machine that was like Grosgrena’s adamantium metal crusher, but also not. It was still made of adamantium, but this one was absolutely massive, at least five meters tall and half that wide, and runed-up like nothing Erick had seen before, with thousands of crisscrossing lines of intricate runes in wrapping, overlapping spiral patterns, that circled from the base of the bottom crusher, and the top of the top crusher, to meet in the middle, in the crushing zone. For another, this adamantium crusher was the only real machine in this room, and this place was protected behind two large metal doors. There weren’t even any vents in the room; people were expected to use [Cleanse] to keep the air breathable. 

Other than the main attraction, there was a low stone table in front of the specialized machine, along with some tools and other stuff they would be using atop that table, and a few anvils and other sharpening and final-touch stations throughout the room.

Mordog explained the items on the table, saying, “So here we got the untempered adamantium, measured out to the gram.” He tapped a bar of silver-whitish-goldish metal, along with half of another bar and a few more slivers on top of that. Then he gestured to seven molds of knives, each the same as the one before, and a scale. “And here’s the target molds and the weighing machines to ensure a proper pour. We pour the hot adamantium into each mold, measuring out 1.1 kilos for each dagger, stopping between each pour to ensure that the weights are correct. You can do a messy pour with steel, but not with adamantium. Adamantium is fucking expensive, and there are no re-melts with this metal if you get it wrong. The molds themselves are a special ceramic sand so they won’t crack under the heat and the stresses, but that does occasionally happen. Sometimes, if the metal hasn’t cooled too much, it’s salvageable, but we got tons of examples of messed up pours if you want one of those, Archmage. Grosgrena seems to think that you could solve our supply woes, so we’ll give you one of those bad melts on the way out.” Mordog moved right along, saying, “Now, to transform raw adamantium into its final form is a special process, unlike any other. All we do is stick it in this specialized crusher, and it does all the work for us.”

A moment passed while Erick waited for him to continue.

But he wasn’t going to continue; that was it. That was all there was to making adamantium.

Mordog smiled.

Erick exclaimed, “What? Really? Just stick it in this machine?”

A few of Mordog’s helpers couldn’t help but smirk, too.

“Yes, really.” Mordog said, “This crusher is an artifact that was enchanted long ago, and which a few people here know how to replicate, but none of us know how it works, exactly. You want to read the runes, go ahead! More luck to you.”

Erick was already studying the whole system with his mana sense.

Mordog said, “We all got our theories on how the crusher works, but they’re probably all wrong. Don’t think Darabella or any of them knows how this works, either, but Grosgrena certainly does. Honestly, though, I don’t care about that. I only care that it works. And so, we’re making metal, and you’re watching.”

Erick stood back and let the men and women work.

Mordog picked up the pieces of untempered adamantium and tossed them into the crusher, then he adjusted some depth measurements and cast some controlling spells upon the mechanism. The machine began to do what it was meant to do, rapidly moving up and down, crushing the raw adamantium in the divot in the center. Erick was happy to discover that screeching adamantium gave off a slightly nicer noise than platinum when it encountered under multi-ton pressures. The silver adamantium deformed under heavy weights, taking on a more golden glow as it heated from the pressures applied.

And Erick noticed the first change from a normal imbuing crush; Mordog didn’t toss the adamantium around so that it could be recrushed from a different angle. The machine did that all on its own, using some form of [Telekinesis] imbued in the crusher itself.

No one said a word as the magical machine did its thing.

And then the second difference appeared, as the runic inscriptions began to glow, becoming white lights upon the black metal, like stars glowing in the night sky.

And the silver-rosy metal inside the divot turned even brighter, rapidly matching the white glow of the inscriptions, as a tiny song filled the air, speaking of endless nights and bright lights to be found inside the darkness; bright lights which would never fade.

So the song was new, too.

Erick listened, and it was rapidly apparent that no one else heard anything, or if they did, then it was old hat to them. But as the crusher continued and the white adamantium flashed over to fully-liquid light, the song shifted to something Darker, something that should have terrified everyone there if they could hear it. For if they heard Melemizargo’s voice like Erick was hearing, then they would not be so calm and collected, like they had done this a hundred times before.

The white liquid suddenly inverted to full-black as Melemizargo silently sang of terrible vengeance and of how no one deserved the power they had stolen from the mana—

The song suddenly ended.

The machine stopped. The metal was ready.

Mordog imbued a secondary set of runes on the machine that were clearly labeled [Alter Friction] and some sort of mutilated [Force Wall] and [Force Platform]. The black liquid adamantium raised into the air to stabilize inside a crucible of Force, and then the liquid poured outward, into a waiting adamantium crucible that was already glowing with [Alter Friction] runes on its surface.

Events proceeded rapidly from there, with few words exchanged between anyone, except to call out numbers and weights as the well-practiced team moved the liquid adamantium back and forth between the weigh station and molds, filling and measuring as they went. Soon, seven daggers awaited their finishing touches inside their ceramic homes, and the crucible contained no more liquid adamantium. They had used every single drop.

Mordog grabbed the first dagger’s container and smashed it open, then he grabbed the barely-cooled dagger with his bare hands and rushed over to the nearest anvil, saying, “With me, archmage! Watch and see what you can learn!”

Erick followed, still out of it from so clearly hearing Melemizargo’s Song—

It wasn’t a song, was it? It was a curse— No. A Curse. That’s what it had to be—

Mordog smirked as he eyed Erick out of the corner of his eye, and smashed down upon the dagger with an adamantium hammer, instantly aligning the metal inside with some sort of massively strong use of skills and mana and Skills. “Stay with me, Archmage. You won’t get to see this too often.”

Erick stayed with him; he would ask about the Song in the crusher afterward.

Mordog rapidly worked the first dagger while his assistants took the rest of them and shoved them into an oven to stay as hot as they could, keeping them workable. They were just formation daggers, though, so turning them into workable daggers was rather easy, which was why Mordog made them in batches. The finishing touches involved some smashing to make them straight and some Skills to make them perfect and some slow cooling and even a bit of reheating to ensure the interior structure of the adamantium came out perfect, but Mordog confessed something near the end of it all, which made Erick wonder what, exactly, was going on with the black metal.

“Adamantium is like all the other magical metals, Archmage.” Mordog said, “They don’t require as much skill as iron and steel, for the magic makes them more perfect than they have any right to be. I barely smashed any of these daggers, but I can already tell that they’re going to turn out perfect, as soon as they harden. The flow is perfect. The balance is great. No fractures. They’ll make great formation daggers. You just can’t do shit with them after they’re cooled.” He finished grinding the edge of the last dagger upon an adamantium grinder and looked at the edge, saying, “These are apprentice-easy things to make. If the materials weren’t so damned expensive, then that’s what we’d do.” He held the light-drinking dagger up, looking at it for imperfections and finding none. Then he turned to Erick. “That’s the final dagger. Questions?”

Erick instantly asked, “Do you hear any songs when you crush the adamantium?”

Mordog frowned a little. “… No? Just screeching.” He lifted his head and asked one of his guys, “You hear anything strange when the machine is running?”

“No, sir.” “Tearing metal.” “The machine might need a checkup, or oil?”

“Bah!” Mordog huffed, “If I ever see you putting oil on my machines, I’m gonna hurt you, Vord. You need to remake [Control Machine], and you need to make it good this time.”

The last helper just shrugged.

Erick said, “So none of you heard any music.”

Mordog said, “I heard you can hear magic, so if you’re hearing something here then that’s news to me. What were you hearing?”

“… Nothing important.” As Mordog scoffed, Erick added, “Which is obviously me deflecting, but I will choose to deflect here since none of you heard it, anyway, and it doesn’t really matter since you’ve been using this machine for a long time… Decades?”

“Ha!” Mordog said, “120 years since installation. The older, larger machine is 400-something.”

“Yes.” Erick said, “So what I heard means nothing to anyone.”

“Whatever you say, archmage,” Mordog said.

One of the assistants looked rightfully disappointed, though.

“Thank you for the experience, Mordog.” Erick said, “I truly appreciate it.”

“I might be able to fit you into a personalized lesson tomorrow, after the banquet, if you want?”

Erick stood a bit straighter. “Yes. I would like that. Thank you.”

“You want some adamantium scraps?”

“I do.”

Mordog nodded, then gestured to his guys, saying, “Vord! Get the archmage a failed knife, or something. Whatever he wants within reason.”

“Thanks, Mordog.”

Mordog grunted in acceptance.

“Oh yeah,” Erick asked, “They have yet to ask me to [Withering] the town. Everyone here got checked out for intestinal cores, right?” He didn’t see any in any of them, but he wanted to be sure people were actually doing their due diligence with that. “I expect to [Withering] the town either today or tomorrow.”

A round of truthful ‘Of course, sir!’s met with Erick’s approval.

- - - -

On the way back to the room, and with a half-melted adamantium knife in his hands, Erick sent to Poi, ‘So that was Melemizargo speaking back there, in the music of the crusher’s runic enchantments. Like an overlay. Sort of like a certain word spoken louder at certain times, changing the meaning of the whole working into something Darker. I think it was a Curse put upon adamantium, but I am not sure.’

Poi calmly, and seriously, sent, ‘Ignoring the Dark is usually the much, much safer approach.’

‘… Ah. True.’ After a moment, Erick added, ‘So Jane is bailing. Do you want to bail, too, before I invariably end up meeting Melemizargo? Because with Jane leaving soon and the next destination being Oceanside… Maybe you should think about bailing. Maybe sooner rather than later, too.’

‘We will stay with you all the way, Erick, through Oceanside and beyond, but you will likely leave us behind at some point.’ Poi sent, ‘In such an event, we’ll head back to Spur and wait for you there, alongside Kiri.’

Erick felt a warmth in his chest that spread out in all directions. He grinned; a small expression of the comfort he felt in that wonderful moment. ‘How is she doing these days?’

‘Kiri is doing well. After she heard about what happened in Songli she developed a [Hermetic Weather] spell that rains down molecular wires over a super large area and then twists those threads at her command. Extremely deadly to everything that isn’t solid as steel or very thick stone.’

Erick’s eyes went wide. ‘The threads decay though, right? She’s not leaving problems for future people, is she?’

‘After she stops controlling them they lose cohesion. They usually vanish with any bit of wind disturbing them.’

‘Ah. Good. I approve. I think.’

‘I would approve of you getting a nap before the banquet. You’re loopy again.’

‘Ah… Yes. I should do that.’

‘Yes you should.’

Erick stared at the failed adamantium dagger in his hands. ‘But—’

‘Nope. Sleep first.’

Erick smiled. ‘Yeah, yeah.’