(Second Book Complete!) Runeblade: A Delving & Skill Merging LitRPG

Roads widened as they moved deeper into the city, shading elms relocated from the edges to central planters that were bursting at the seams with carefully manicured undergrowth. The trappings of residential life faded, replaced by mercantilism.

Kaius eyed a towering eight-story building, painted a deep purple due to the creeping vines that coated it utterly. Everywhere, except for the windows that were larger than some entire buildings he’d seen before. Each pane revealed a new wealth of pottery, vases and bowls that had been glazed with ruby filigree or stacked lemons, or a dozen other things.

An entire damn harvest, rendered on bloody crockery. Three stories of it. The sight threw him almost as much as the damn wyrdwall had. How could they possibly sell enough decorative pots to stay open — did they have the entire city’s supply?

Despite his disbelief, plenty of people bustled within — and in a hundred other shops besides.

“We’re almost there,” Ianmus said. “The Plaza is just around the next corner.”

Kaius pulled his gaze away from the shops. The opulence might have been alien to him, but people were starting to look.

He went straight back to gawking as soon as they reached the next bend and the Workingman’s Plaza was revealed in all its glory.

It was enormous, as wide as three blocks and six or seven long, and lined with grand halls in more styles than he could name — though the far end looked to be some sort of fenced off park.

He couldn’t help but skip past the details, sucked in by the immense tree that was planted in a patch of grass at the square’s centre. A living pillar, its trunk was as thick as a house, and its canopy was immense. A solid third of the Plaza drowned in its shadow, a thin and flat emerald ceiling that sprawled out like the cap of a toadstool.

What the hells was it even doing here? He’d only seen trees of that size in the God’s Maw Jungle in the Depths. For a moment, he wondered how he’d even missed it in the first place — until he ignored its sheer mass and noticed that it was almost… stubby. While it was still seven or eight stories tall, the very tips of its canopy were still shorter than even the squatest building that lined the square.

“Been a while since I’ve seen one of those,” Porkchop said, staring fondly at the same tree as they came to a slow halt at the edge of the square.

“What is it?” Kenva asked, craning her head up at it.

“Errr… A short-big-tree-with-wide-branches?” Porkchop replied, as an impression of the exact tree in front of them appeared in Kaius’s mind.

“What?” Porkchop replied when the entire team gave him an odd look. “Naming things doesn’t quite work in beast-speak.”

At the very least, if Porkchop was familiar with it, it had come from the Deep Sea — another relic of the city’s historic encounter with the elves, perhaps? He shot Ianmus a questioning look. The man seemed to know plenty about the city, he’d planned on moving here, after all.

To his surprise, the mage shrugged. “I don’t know everything. Regardless, we’re here.”

Nodding, Kaius pulled his attention away from the living behemoth to get a lay of the surroundings.

“That’s the Spire, I presume?” he asked, pointing to a tower that rose clean above all else on the right hand side of the square. It was rounded, tapering as it rose before bulging out like some sort of tulip bulb. The departure from the architecture he’d seen elsewhere made it stand out, but not quite as much as the slate grey stone that had been melded into a continuous whole, or the flecks that scattered its surface, pulsing with the soft glow of silvery mana.

“It is,” Ianmus confirmed, smiling at the thing. “Something of a generalist branch, like most major cities have. It was founded by a member of Stone Spire — hence the rather monolithic construction.”

Close by, only a few buildings along, Kaius spotted what he was sure was the Runewrights collective. Dense, tightly wrought lines of runic script encircled windows and ran along eaves, and every span of the stone brick had runes chiselled in, each glowing with potent energy.

Even with just a glance, he could tell the building was worked on constantly — even maintaining that many formations would be the full time work of a dozen masters. Light wards, alarms, reinforcement formations, bracing arrays — and that was just what he could recognise at a glance. It was a fortress hiding in plain sight, and a standing testament to the power that runes could leverage.

He and Ianmus would need to visit both the Spire and the Collective soon enough. They had knowledge to distribute. During their time in Dawntown, they’d taken the opportunity to flesh out some of their notes, and detail more of their insights into the fundamentals of both keyseal conjuration and glyphbinding. What they’d passed off before the siege had been… rough. Largely complete, but disjointed and rough all the same. That, and he still remembered how the runwrights he’d met in Deadacre had all but begged him to distribute what he knew through the Collective.

The rest of the plaza was more mundane, but no less interesting. From what Ianmus had told him, only chartered organisations could hold land here. Some buildings were multitenanted — one built of red brick had three brightly coloured emblems hanging from every floor. While some were trade guilds — masons, glasers, merchants associations and the like — the bulk looked like private organisations. Or at least, he assumed so. The deep red sign with yellow lettering saying ‘Merfallon’s League’ that hung over his head certainly didn’t sound like it was dedicated to a craft.

Ianmus even pointed out a few key sites that were visible throughout the city. Both the grand Anthrast library and the ducal palace sat at the peaks of two large hills, looming over Baanswell. The library was a little to their east, nearer to the wyrdwall, and was a stately thing of grey stone and monolithic pillars. The hill it sat on was an immense reserve, covered in brilliant manicured gardens that shone like coloured beacons. In comparison, the lands surrounding the steepled palace at the centre of the city were more built up — though no less green. Noble estates clustered around the spired giant of stone and glass, getting smaller and more compact the further away they got.

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The one thing he couldn’t spot from where they stood was the very thing they’d come for.

“Where’s the Guild?” Kaius questioned.

He’d expected some sort of position of prominence — it was the Guild. One of, if not the largest organisation in all of Vaastivar.

“I think it’s in the park,” Kenva replied, pointing to the walled off green space at the far end of the square. “Look there, just above the gate.”

Kaius frowned and focused his Truesight, following her direction. A wrought iron fence, easily twelve strides high, surrounded a dense copse of trees growing in the middle of the city. The gate was easy to spot, twice as high as the surrounding fence and smack in the middle. At its zenith there was a crest — a cross staff and sword. The Guild’s emblem.

“What’s the Guild doing in a park?” he questioned.

“It’s not in anything — that whole thing is the Baanswell campus,” Ianmus explained, holding up their map to tap a green square half the size of the Workingman’s Plaza proper.

Kaius flicked between the map, and the massive green space in the distance. It was what? That was huge! Deadacre’s guildhall had been sizable, but judging by the very expensive and very accurate map they had bought, the one in Baanswell was nearly the size of Hanrick’s estate!

“I’m more curious about what’s going on over there,” Kenva said, nodding to a crowd at the edge of the fenced off Guild.

“Mmm, certainly looks like something is happening.”

The gathered people seemed… agitated; jostling, as though they were fighting over a bakery’s last loaves when times were tight. There were guards there too, though he could only see the tips of their halberds hovering over the masses.

Sharing a quick look, they set off, walking across the shaded square.

The closer they got, the more worried Kaius got. There had to be two, three-hundred people gathered, and they looked like they were fuming. Guards had corralled them — almost as if they were defending the Guild to stop it being swarmed, but that made no sense.

It didn’t take him long to spot something — a wide sign, set on the Guild side of the iron fence. It had been painted white, with clean black lettering, but the crowd cut off whatever was written.

The mob was clearly audible now, voices mashing together into a constant drone. The closer they got, the more Kaius could make out — and the less he liked what he was hearing.

“Order! Order! By the decree of the Duke of Flowers, you must get back!” an unseen guard yelled, prompting a chorus of yelled dissatisfaction.

“You can’t keep us away forever! It’s out there now, probably only a few months before we all know anyway!” someone yelled.

“They released it everywhere! My boy’s only got four months to take advantage of this, you’re holding back his future!”

Kaius watched the crowd surge, jostling in — only to suddenly heave back. Moments later, a guard captain stepped high onto a block of stone at the base of the fence, rising above the crowd.

“Listen well! The Duke has your best interest in mind — these skills are untested! Do you want your children to be stuck with a useless collection of skills they have no need for? Until our good Dukes can verify these alleged ‘discoveries’, possession of duplicitous information is punishable by fine, and attempts at distribution with a year’s imprisonment!”

Kaius frowned, hard. The dukedoms were trying to suppress the Legacy Skills the guild had released. He wanted to be surprised, he really really did, but of course they were. It was a direct threat to their supremacy, and the advantage they held over the general populace.

Should he be grateful that they weren’t storming the Guild directly, or cutting down anyone who dared learn and attempt to better themselves?

Watching those guards lie to the populace’s face sat sour on his tongue. Bastards.

Evidently, he wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

“Oh, fuck off, you lying prick!” someone yelled from behind the guard — within the Guild.

Kaius spotted the heckler quickly. Within the trees that lined the edges of the grounds, a crowd of delvers had gathered. They were armed and armoured, but despite the fuming faces he could see, they weren’t gearing up to fight.

The guard captain though… it looked like the veins in his neck were on the verge of popping. He did not, however, respond.

Kaius understood why as they drew close to the gates, and had enough of an angle to read the sign that sat inside the fence.

‘Guild property is sovereign. Dukedom edicts do not hold within these halls, and all are welcome to the knowledge within.’

But if that was the case, why the crowd, and why the guards?

He got his answer when a squad of five men rushed towards them before they could get within a dozen paces of the entrance. They were headed by the captain, the man still fuming from the heckling he’d just received.

“Halt! By order of the Duke, only Guild members are to be granted access to the Baanswell Guildhall, and all must submit themselves to an inspection for contraband!”

Kaius stopped short, right in front of the man. Inspection? Absolutely not. He’d sooner strip the Duke naked and string him up by his toes in this very square.

The guard craned his neck upwards, his stoic glare slipping away by the seconds. Kaius watched the squad tighten their grips on their halberds.

“No.”

“I was not asking, delver, these are legal orders!”

Kaius summoned a gleaming silver emblem, holding it high enough so that it was visible to all. If he wasn’t a complete idiot, he wouldn’t press them — few rules applied to all equally.

“This is all you’re getting, let us through.”

“Shit, did you see that? They’re silver! This is the best chance we’re getting! Do it, do it now!” someone hissed, just barely audible over the crowd.

Their excited urgency caught Kaius’s attention — it came from the delvers. They’d been quiet; quiet enough he doubted even the guards would have heard them.

He looked over just in time to see a mana-laden gust of wind send a tumbling cloud of paper sky high — right over the heads of the crowd.

The guard captain looked at the raining pamphlets with apoplectic fury. “Batons out! Seize the papers and anyone touching them!”

It took barely a second for the first terrified scream.