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

Kaius followed behind the rushing Runemaster Casso, his every step matching two of the older artisan’s.

They tunneled their way deep into the Collective, making for the reinforced testing chambers that lay deep beneath the earth. Passing a sea of scribing stations, desks towered high with papers of runic diagrams and drafted treatises, Kaius couldn’t help but smile. He so rarely got to surround himself with other practitioners of his art — even if he had taken a divergent path to most. Apprentices carved through alchemically prepared plates of tin and steel, their styli hissing as they practiced their work. Journeymen bustled, half passing around incomplete ward diagrams for comment and half utterly focused on routine industrial work like bellows and streetlamp replacements. He didn’t get a glimpse of the true professionals — those either had personal offices, or their own workplaces out in the city proper.

Without fail, he and Casso would enter a room, and the layered conversations would die on the tongues of slack-jawed mouths. That was a visibility and renown Kaius was both ready for, and a bit more comfortable with than hushed whispers of any of his exploits in Deadacre. The focus was less on him, and more on his magic. Plus, It was hard to avoid with Eirnith carved into his very temples — and he wasn’t about to start walking around cowled like some sort of common thug.

It was the third day since his return to Baanswell. After the celebration at the guild tavern, he and his team had returned to the Ruby Crown with Helena’s team. The concierge, Jossua, had been delighted to see them again — and true to his uncanny abilities, had gotten them set up in a suite that was somehow even more perfect than the last. They’d stayed on the ground floor, for ease of access through a private garden that was more a small, overgrown jungle of violet wisteria and bright red rhododendrons. With its oversized lounge suite, Kaius thought the place had been built for entertaining. In practice, it meant that even Porkchop had somewhere to sprawl out.

Falling semi-comatose on the suspiciously cloud-like furniture, the four of them had retired quickly, and their next day was dedicated to nothing more than a well-earned rest.

That was all they had time for. A missive from Julian would be coming any day, and they had much to fill the time while they waited for that. He and Ianmus had left bright and early to investigate the progress of the Collective and the local Spire’s on their new magics, while Kenva and Porkchop had set off to find out when the next Hiwiann caravans would be arriving from the local merchant authority.

It might have barely been a few months since he’d shared his treatise, but Kaius suspected plenty of man hours had been sunk into glyphbinding. He’d put very few restrictions on the knowledge compared to most discoveries.

“Here we are!” Runemaster Casso said, pushing open a door to a wide, low-ceilinged testing lab.

It was far from empty. Across one wall, runewrights and mages crowded around a long bench, exploring a dozen different experiments. All of them turned and froze, before the runemaster waved them back to their work. Casso had told him that the dual-nature of glyphbinding as both rune and spellcasting art had engendered a rare level of cooperation between the institutions. Kaius was glad that they’d managed to work something out — he expected that both disciplines would have plenty of insights to further knowledge.

Across another bench on the far wall, Kaius could see evidence of past experiments. Logs of transparent, mint-green jelly were lined up in progressively worse levels of deterioration. Each was connected to a small mana gathering array, but Kaius couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were supposed to be doing. Especially when all that remained of the right most ones was splattered gobs of muck that stretched up the walls and onto the ceiling.

“What are those?” Kaius asked as he followed Casso to a small, segmented office space in the corner of the room.

“Hmm?” Casso replied, before the runemaster followed his gaze. “Ah. A rather crude testing implement. Glyphbinding presents some rather…complex challenges. It can be quite explosive, and no one is up for risking a hand. Those logs are a sort of alchemical flesh-substitute. We use traditional rune-scribing methods to create some mana flows to mimic what you might see in an arm, and then use them to test stability.”

That was…rather genius. Although, judging by the mess, Kaius suspected it was anything but perfect.

“How do you manage the different properties of muscle and venous networks?”

It was far more of a problem for truly three dimensional glyph work like his own, but even for the surface level inscription he had shared with the Collective, it would be important.

“We don’t. Even the stable prototype that you provided inevitably fails, but we learn much from comparing variation in the speed, degree, and violence of the inevitable collapse. Still a bloody pain in the ass, though — the jelly is delicate to work with, and we can only procure so much.”

Kaius winced. That would slow things down, though hopefully only for now. Any inscription could detonate rather violently if enough mistakes were made. As more of the basic tenets of glyphbinding were discovered, Kaius was sure there would be plenty of well laid out paths for a prospective student to study long before they ever set a stylus against their skin.

They entered the small office space in the corner of the room. With free-standing room dividers that barely came up to Kaius’s chest, it gave a clear view of the entire space — all the better to hurl corrections at overly excited junior runewrights, Kaius guessed. The desks inside were also far closer to a draftsman’s than any administrator’s, with measured graphing lines crossing its surface, and dozen different stains and scorchmarks where inscribed paper had ignited from past accidents.

Casso rifled through a drawer, before cycling through another dozen as he searched for a specific diagram. He’d been working on something personally, and had leapt at the opportunity to get Kaius’s input.

While he searched, they chatted about how research had progressed.

The Collective had, it seemed, found an endless wealth of apprentices willing to throw everything they had at Glyphbinding. Entire planned careers had been thrown out the window in favour of the pursuit of a research class focused on the new art. More than that, there had been an utter deluge of the young and hopeful hoping to assist the program with more practical, combat application. Plenty of those were young, would-be mages who were attached to the local Spire in some capacity — but more were simply people. Those who had seen opportunity, and hoped to leverage not just the new wealth of Skills released by the guild, but make a name for themselves in the Collective.

Casso had been all too happy to oblige, as had a number of the other experienced runewrights in Baanswell. While they weren’t doling out yet more Legacy Skills, they had formed classes to teach a number of rune-related Skills that they had discovered between them. Between that and the Guild list, the prospects had plenty to do — and that was before all the work that was going into developing the glyphs themselves, and discovering Skills that made use of them.

“You’ve already found some?” Kaius asked, almost overwhelmed with the smell of parchment, ink, and velum.

“Mmm?” Casso replied, his head buried in a draw overflowing with schematics. “Oh, yes! The theory side has been slow going, though we’ve found a couple: Inscriber of Flesh, Glyphic Dabbler, Explorator of Spell-hymns and Sense Warped Angles being the most promising. Practical application has been much more exciting, as a few daring youths have been dead set on pushing your father’s glyph to the limit, and more than a few seasoned runewrights have helped to devise new, stable spells. Glyphbinding Mastery pops up reliably, but we’ve seen a whole slew of potential meta-magics pop up. Most are just common or uncommon, so we’ve just recorded them and let them lie — but it is progress!”

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Kaius blinked. “You’ve been making use of the first glyph?”

Casso paused his search to look up at him with an incredulous expression. “Why wouldn’t we? It’s brilliant work, and more than capable of supporting a full swathe of first-tier appropriate spell-hymns. We just need to invent them, and that is relatively simple thanks to the similarities with High Lothian enchanting.”

The runemaster stood up, calling out to one of the runewrights working at the far edge of the room. In moments, Kaius was leafing through twenty different inscription schematics. Each of them reused the most complex segment of the original spell his father had provided, where it connected to the glyph. Everything else was utterly novel, half of it pushing beyond the bounds of Kaius’s own understanding of High Lothian. He did, however, have the base knowledge and mental Stats to reason out their functions based on the description and what he was seeing.

Leafing through one Mercer’s Stone-toothed Vice, Kaius felt a growing surge of pride and longing war in his chest. They were twins that buoyed and ached, both. In his hands was the very real, physical proof of Father’s legacy, and it was quite literally a world-changing one. But by the gods, he wished Father could be here himself. This would have been perfect for him — good, honest work that he could have devoted himself to when he no longer needed to hide in the forest. The fates were not so kind, and that cut deeper than any blade.

The long shadow of old grief was a potent thing, but it was not enough to stifle the sheer glee of the moment. Pride won, and a smile grew wider on his face.

“Ah, here we are,” Casso said, pulling a diagram from the shelf he searched through.

Kaius put down his stack of spell-hymns and took the page from the Runemaster. What waited for him was a glyph. It was his Father’s, but also…not. Key bits of the central arrays had been shifted, altered, and utterly replaced in ways that Kaius struggled to make sense of.

“What is it?”

“Something I’ve been working on with a few of my peers in the duchy,” Casso explained. “Before we begin the monumental task of devising a script for glyph-binding, we need to know the exact capabilities and limitations of the multi-scriptual approach your father used. This glyph is a sister to the original, aimed at supporting self-targeted enhancing spells.”

“Like my current glyphs. Clever.”

At least, in the sense of each of his glyphs having different focuses.

“A little different, actually. From what I gathered from our last talk, your current glyphs are specialised along spell-casting focuses, correct? Offensive, defensive, mobility and the like?”

Kaius nodded.

“Your father’s first glyph was created for spells that shape and direct physical material. That could just as easily be firing a crystal bolt, summoning a tangle of grasping roots, or creating a reinforced shield of floating stone. In testing we found that spells that increase your speed, or directly impart a force on a target, or create beams of pure energy are invariably unstable.”

Kaius’s brow shot up his face. Wracking his memories, he couldn’t actually remember Father mentioning such a focus of the glyph. But, then again, that was not so surprising. So much of their time had been limited by his training. A small idiosyncrasy that had almost no bearing on his ability to use his glyph would have been one detail amongst thousands that had slipped to the wayside.

“So this is tweaked for different spells?” Kaius asked, shaking the page he was holding.

Casso nodded. “Yes, but it doesn’t work. It should work — the theory is there, and conventional runecraft says it should be every bit as stable as the original, but it’s not. It’s even stable on a slate, but the second we inscribe it on the jelly — poof.”

Casso pointed at the layers of dried sludge that coated the rough stone ceiling at the far end of the room.

“I suspect your father discovered something similar, which is how he landed on the original having the focus it does. I was hoping you might have some insights.”

Kaius turned back to the paper in his hand. On a theory level, he knew he wouldn’t be much help. His class was focused on the practical application of glyphs that were far removed from this iteration. He did, however, have a few advantages — he knew those advanced glyphs like the back of his hand, his mana-control was ironclad, and he had a regeneration skill.

Maybe once it was on his skin, and he could really get a feel for it, something might jump out to him.

Kaius rolled up his left sleeve to the shoulder, baring his upper arm. It was the best spot he could think of. His thigh was awkward, and Drakthar would interfere with inscribing anything on his forearms.

The already half-hearted discussion at the far end of the room died completely, mages and runewrights turning to blatantly stare.

Ignoring them, Kaius poured over the diagram in front of him. He didn’t know what half of it meant, but he was familiar with the individual runes, and it was a mere sliver of the complexity of even a single first-tier Vesryn spell.

Mana ripped out of his centre, carving glowing lines across his upper arm. Runes formed, and the sweeping arcs of overlapping circles and tesselated geometrics formed. It took seconds.

But he didn’t feel the distinctive snap of the glyph settling into place. He could feel it intimately: if he let his Will slack, and released his mana, the woven flows of mana within the structure would run wild.

Kaius frowned, his focus flowing into the glyph. Unlike his normal magic, it was entirely surface level, lacking any of the three-dimensional complexity of Vesryn glyphs. It made it odd to work with, forcing him to draw deep on his memories of how his original had felt, and puzzle out how it compared to his new powers.

Carved into his flesh, and woven out of his own mana flows, Kaius quickly spotted half a dozen points of friction. It had nothing to do with the runework or the geometrics being wrong. Instead, they seemed to be reacting oddly with the natural flow of mana deeper in the semi-physical conduits that spread through his body. It was only a slight repulsion, but repeated so many times it was more than enough to prevent the glyph from ‘sticking’.

Kaius frowned. It was exactly the kind of minor instability that sacred geometry was used to correct — except in this case, the problem was occurring on an orthogonal plane, and the warping of his skin as he moved was only making the problem worse. Two-dimensional geometrics just weren’t cutting it.

Freezing for a moment, he suppressed the urge to groan. Now that he’d noticed the problem, the solution was almost painfully obvious — he worked with geometrics far more complex than this.

Acting on an instinct honed by his experience with true three-dimensional glyphs, Kaius spun out a thread of mana. Energy arced underneath the body of the simple glyph, carving a series of intersecting hemispheres. Then, he carved triangular structures to support the points of instability he’d noticed. It wasn’t perfect, and it would need plenty of refinement, but as Kaius felt the glyph snap into place, he felt every bit as thrilled as when he’d slayed a gods’ damned dragon.

He grinned, staring at the swirling black runes on his arm.

“What did you do?” Casso asked, grabbing his arm to stare at the runework. “I’ve been trying to get it stable for weeks! Was it a problem with the alchemical jelly?”

“No,” Kaius said. He unpicked the weave of the glyph, letting it dissolve safely. Focusing, he pushed his mana outside of his body, and wove it into a replication of what he’d done just moments before. “I had a hunch.”

Casso dived for paper and ink, furiously flicking between the glowing diagram as he transcribed the new additions. A crowd gathered quickly, as the runewrights across the room abandoned their pretence and hurried for a closer look. The mages followed at a slower pace, curious, but not quite understanding their colleagues’ fanaticism.

“Do you have any idea what this is?” Casso said, wild eyed.

Kaius grinned, slowly spinning his glowing diagram so it could be more easily viewed from other angles. It might have been basic, but that barely mattered. This was a big step for runic inscription — though it would take a lot of time before they would know if it was helpful for more than just glyphbinding and other body formations.

“It’s a stable three-dimensional formation made entirely from existing scripts,” he replied happily.