Runeblade

Kaius leaned back against the wall of the safe room, his arms folded in his lap as he took slow breaths.

His spar with Porkchop had worked out a lot of the tense energy that had lingered after his fight with the rootborers. It had been helpful too — he'd gotten a much better handle on his new Mercurial Reversal, and had gained a couple of levels for it on top of that.

As he'd grown used to the sudden surge of speed it presented, his parries had grown less and less wooden — more fluid. Thankfully, managing the sapping strength and redirected power was much simpler. The drain only made controlling his opponents swing easier to manage, and the empowered riposte was less a boost to physical strength than it was a burst of hardened energy that projected from his sword point upon impact.

Unfortunately, there hadn't been much of an opportunity to try out his Hymnfocus as much as he would have liked. He'd only had two remaining combat inscriptions, so once he'd burned through his reserves of Stamina they'd elected to take a break.

Now that his Mana was full, it was time to inscribe once more. He planned on an even split of his Drakthar spells, and Zone of Discombobulation — the more variety he got to try infusing into his blade, the quicker he would learn.

It wouldn't take long — not with how he had grown. Every point of Intelligence increased the rate at which he could pull on his Mana pool, and every one of Willpower increased the power and granularity of his control. Spinning his mana into the fine three-dimensional runes of his spells was easy now.

Even without Tonal Weaving and Resonance Amplification, the mana control he'd struggled with so much a year ago would have been as easy as lifting a feather.

But he did have those Skills, and they had grown much. When he'd first gained his class, holding each spell inscription in his mind had been like trying to wrestle a greased hog. Every time he had latched onto a single fine detail, another would slip free — leaving him wrestling with a hazy and indistinct image of the work he was trying to follow.

It forced him to slow — recheck his work constantly as he gnawed his cheeks in worry he'd made a mistake with runes completely unintelligible to him.

A fact that was only worsened by his low stats and low level Resonance Amplification. The tight weaves and exacting precision of Vesryn runework had played hell on his focus — each rune had been an exercise in frustration, his Mana bucking in his grip as he had twisted it in on itself to form rune after rune.

The end result had been that reinscribing a full suite of spells had taken him an hour or more. For less than ten gods' scorned inscriptions! Such a pace was almost unimaginably slow to him now.

No longer did his mind ache as he strived to keep a full spell in his memory — they hung there as clear as if they had been made of silver wire. No longer did he agonise over every rune as he painstakingly carved them hairsbreadth by hairsbreadth — he stamped them whole cloth, churning out spells in less than a minute.

With his current Mana pool, he could inscribe nearly a hundred Hateful Nails. He'd never exactly sat down and timed it, but he doubted it would take any longer than three-quarters of an hour to finish them all — maybe even less.

A salient change — but not the only one, nor potentially even the most important.

With the growth of Tonal Weaving had come understanding. Each of his glyphs and spells was as familiar as looking at his own reflection. True, he still lacked comprehension of the actual Vesryn runic language — but he could feel how they fit together.

The stability of each curve, the exact tolerances of each stroke of his mana, and the compatibility of each three dimensional rune that linked into its neighbours.

He called his glyphs into his mind's eye. Drakthar, Aelina, Vyrthane, Eirnith. Each shone like the moon on a clear night as he turned them over, inspecting them from all angles.

Stretching his mind a little further, Kaius called his spells into being, each one sitting below their parent glyph. He marveled at their complexity — the depth of work that must have gone into devising not just them, but the very language that they were built from.

He'd only brushed up against the edges of the Vesryn order — a few tidbits learnt from skill and class epigraphs all he had to go off. One thing was obvious: they were a titanic force, wherever they might be. Heroic initiates, and members who spread far and wide, pursuing their order's aims — hells, bonding with greater beasts was normalised!

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If that wasn't enough, they were an order of magical prodigies. They could be nothing else to have developed such a complex craft.

Kaius might not have known the depths of Father's true strength — likely would never know — but one thing had been certain. The man had been a consummate runewright, furthered the art far beyond the imaginings of even the average master. Kaius's blade was proof of that. Growth weapons could only be made by the strongest of runesmiths — those that blended runecraft with metallurgy.

Without fail, every growth item was a pinnacle creation of someone legendary. He'd only heard of two in the current era — Blackhand of the Drozag Mountains and Ulria of the Deep Sea. An elf and a dwarf. The last well-known human runesmith of such a calibre was Bronyar the Broad — a legendary third tier who had died centuries ago.

Yet…even with that expertise, that mastery Kaius knew that Father had never even come close to brushing up on three-dimensional runecraft. Even for a man that had devised a rudimentary glyph after a year of theorycrafting with only his knowledge, charcoal, and what flat stone he could find in the woods, Vesryn runes were simply too divergent and too advanced.

Supposedly, the first runic writing systems had been rudimentary things produced from studying the inscrutable, shifting runic scripts that could be found on Depths portals and depths-wrought artefacts. A development from studying concrete examples of mana responding to specific shapes and forms.

Sacred geometry had been first, according to father. Even if system runes themselves were shifting and impossible to replicate, the tessellating patterns of geometrics that surrounded and supported them were not. From there, it had been experimentation and time that had brought forth the many variant rune-scripts that were used by the runewrights of Vaastivar today.

But to make the jump to include depth? He struggled to even imagine where that innovation would begin. He couldn't think of a single example existing in the Depths — at least not in the layers that had been reached over the millenia. No doubt whatever initial developments in that vein had been found were as simplistic as the first runic scripts in his world had been, but it was still a staggering jump in complexity.

Even the sacred geometry was mind boggling — complex and potent enough that Ianmus had managed to use it to pursue yet another development in magic.

It was no wonder he was struggling with reverse-engineering how the script worked. At first, he'd thought it was just lacking enough points of comparison. Then, when he'd had a couple of glyphs and spells under his belt, and his skills had grown, he'd realised just how little he knew. The number of runes? The variations and substitutions in what was used across glyphs and spells? It was simply beyond him — he hadn't even been able to say with certainty if they were created from a single script, or a family of closely related ones.

Now, with his skills growing and his stats more developed, he was getting somewhere.

Kaius turned the glyphs and spell-hymns around in his mind's eye, focusing on dozens after dozens of individual twisted runes of light. There were copies shared only between his main Drakthar glyph, and his Zone of Discombobulation — between Expedient Shunt, and Hateful Nail, and more. There were tesselations of ellipsoids that were intersected with layered triangles in Eirnith and War Haven, both at exactly the same angles.

It painted a picture. They were a single language — too much was shared, and he was certain that the remnant examples of singular runes and geometric patterns only existed because his library of examples was still comparatively bare. Those lone islands of uniqueness were rare too, a bare three dozen at most.

It was gratifying progress, one that made his mind hunger for more — a reward for the many nights he had lain awake, turning over the glyphs in his mind as he poured over every hair's breadth of their structure.

There was only one problem. He was running out of room to make much more progress without practical experimentation. As it stood, that was absolutely out of the question. He didn't have the mana control or stability to weave the runes outside of his body with pure manipulation — and it wasn't like he could carve a three dimensional structure into a sheet of paper either.

He absolutely would not be messing around with a barely-understood script inside of his body either. Vesryn runes were potent — far beyond his original glyph, and that had nearly taken off his hand half a dozen times before he'd successfully inscribed it.

No, Kaius didn't fancy blowing himself up. At least, not until Lesser Regeneration progressed to a higher tier or evolved so that it would be able to restore lost limbs. A little pain didn't scare him, and he could handle a missing hand for a week or two.

That was, unfortunately, likely to be far off. For it to result in any meaningful progress, and for it not to hamper their progression overmuch, his regeneration would need to be quick. That wasn't likely to happen with his upcoming class evolution, even if Lesser Regeneration was lucky enough to evolve.

Kaius sighed, running his hand through his hair. He'd hit a bottleneck.

It wasn't the complete end of the world. There were more patterns in his inscriptions to study as he unlocked more spells and glyphs. It also wasn't like the path forwards had been completely closed off.

He'd be able to experiment in the future. Either with his aforementioned development to his healing, or when Tonal Weaving had progressed to the point that he could manifest runes directly into the air.

Regardless, he still needed to practice Runeblade Hymnfocus, and to do that he needed spells.

Kaius willed a torrent of mana to flow to his left hand. Gripping it tightly, he twisted it into the form he required, and pressed it into his flesh. A familiar stinging burn radiated as black lines and runes spilled over the back of his palm in seconds.

Half a minute later he moved on to the next.