Runeblade

The final split boulder was a large thing. He recognised it, a perfect duplicate of another further across the base of the slope. The same one Father had used to teach him runes.

The shifting glyph on the boulder's face made Father’s master runework look like a child's drawing. It was jagged and aggressive, impossibly crisp lines cutting through stone, before they cracked into hard points and ran back through themselves.

He found it almost impossible to focus on a single aspect of the shifting rune, his eyes tugged from point to point. Every time he roved back over a spot, its entire geometry had shifted, rolling back over itself to present him with a new face.

And yet, he did not ever see the thing actually move. It was simply different every time he focused. Still, he could work out some aspects of its construction, even if in the broadest of senses. It was similar to his own glyph, in the way a barn cat was similar to a lion. A central nexus of violent shards, or crackling spokes, or twisting knots. A controller, shifting faster than he could focus on it. Swooping lines that wove themselves into a binding, before shattering like glass.

He swallowed thickly, a vein on his temple throbbing as the mutable design made his head start to ache. It didn’t take long for him to give up studying much more of the formation.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped forwards, revealing the description of his final potential skill.

Latent Glyph of Drakthar:

Class Skill- Tier I

Affinity: Arcane, Martial

Selection Available!

Heroic

The ‘Glyph of Scouring,’ Drakthar is etched for aggression and dominance in battle. Its hymns unleash raw, directed energy in bursts of screaming magic. Of all Vesryn glyphs, it is the most warlike, as such Initiates have its latent form inscribed on their hands and wrists to make it easier to direct - and less likely to bite something important.

This skill allows the user to inscribe Vesryn evocation spell-hymns to be activated at will, limited only by the availability of mana to reserve into the working, and sufficient space on the body. Creates a hymnbook on the user's status if one is not already present. Paired on both hands, each glyph can cast hymns inscribed on their counterpart.

Each level moderately increases the power, range, afflictions, and area of effect of spell-hymns cast through the glyph.

Each level slightly decreases the physical size of inscribed spell-hymns.

Every 100 levels the user may learn another runic hymn of the relevant tier to add to their hymnbook.

Spell-hymns Known:

Tier I-

Selection Available!

Air hissed between Kaius’s clenched teeth as he took in the nature of what would be the first skill of his class. There was no doubt in his mind.

Drakthar. He rolled the word across his tongue, feeling its hard points and sharp edges. It was a good name. A fitting one. Something that a warrior-king would name his weapon.

It was perfect. A source of new spells, his charged hymns limited only by his mana pool, and an increase of power that scaled with his level. He could think of nothing better. Plus, to his core he burned to grasp as much of glyph-binding as he could.

While he wanted to make use of his blade just as much, he had had a lifetime of training with the weapon, and he did not need a class skill to cleave in someone's skull. Not so with glyph-binding.

He still had his original glyph, sure, but the system itself had said it was not much better than a poor imitator. The creation of a genius no doubt, but it was a sling to his class’s trebuchet. He wanted, needed, to see the difference in their power. He would just need to get rid of his old one first.

Dismissing the description of the skill, Kaius looked down to his hand. Clean runework sprawled over the back of his hand, wrapping around the sides to creep over the edges of his palm, butted up on the base of his fingers - including the two missing ones - and sprawling up his wrist.

The work of a genius, but still a jury-rigged connection of five highly disparate scripts, all working in concert to force a result far outside of their intended use cases. Body formations might have already been a thing, but they were simplistic compared to his glyph. Simple passive effects of reinforcement, made to bind to flesh through runic advancements.

Yet still, at its core it was a proof of concept. Nothing made that more clear than the shifting lines of the glyph behind him. It would still be invaluable. All mystic arts started from humble beginnings, and if he could find himself an ally in a scholar it would serve as an excellent starting point for plumbing the fundamentals of the Third Pillar. It was often far easier to start from humble basics than it was to work back from the creation of potentially millennia of development.

It still had to go. Nothing of true value would be lost. He still had his notebook, containing every scrap of knowledge his father could impart on his development of the glyph, and Kaius’s own personal notes on his experiences during its construction.

He reached for the glyph with his mana, feeling his internal control react with far more depth, power, and grace than ever before. Resonance Amplification at work.

Mana thrummed through the glyph, forging a tightly bound connection with his deepest centre. He could see it, how it connected to him. Kept itself stable. Dozens of threads of the circulating resource invigorated the working like blood vessels, pumping it through the clean lines of the glyph before returning it to him untouched.

It would be simple to rip the threads apart. It would also likely blow his hand off. Enhanced with his latest skills, and the acuity of capped True Sight, he could see why it had failed so violently during his failed inscribings. Breaking the thin and delicate connections that held the glyph stable would send the mana into a discordant rampage. Amplified by the sacred geometry and linguistic power of runes, it would roil. Boiling over until it overwhelmed the glyph's natural stability in a violent detonation.

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Thankfully, with the new depth of his internal mana control, he could feel which threads fed the glyph mana, and which ones syphoned it away. Every scrap of theory he had learned said that cutting the threads that fed the working would allow it to safely drain off its energy, eventually collapsing when it no longer had the throughput to bind itself to him.

He started to cut.

Gossamer thin vessels pinged as he snapped the conduits of mana one by one. There had to be thousands, but he exercised patience. He had no interest in blowing off his hand. Not when he had already lost a couple of fingers. Health could do a lot, but the complete removal of body parts was still out of reach. For now.

One by one he cut the vessels, each leading to a slight fluctuating wave in the mana within his body and glyph. All at once it would have been too much, but as it was the disruption was so small it entirely abated in the moment it took him to move to the next connection.

Minutes passed, and then it was done.

Devoid of the lifeblood it needed, the final gift that Father had given him dissolved. It burned with the light of accomplishment and sacrifice, golden flakes of ash falling from his skin as it burned away like so many hymns had in the past.

“I see you have made your choice then.” his guide said solemnly, respectful of the moment.

Kaius breathed, taking a moment to watch the scattered remnants of his glyph disperse on the clean forest wind. It was fitting for the Sea to be their final resting place, even if it was only a recreation.

“I have.” he responded.

“Good. A glyph is a strong first choice. They are, after all, central to the Runeblade class. Once you have picked it, I will lead you elsewhere for you to choose your first spell. After that, it will be time for you to leave.” Kaius’s guide watched him closely, silver-streaked brown hair rustling in the gentle breeze that rolled through the Sea.

“Will you be here for my next class?” Kaius asked. He’d grown comfortable being around the construct, even if it was weird to talk to something wearing his own body like a suit.

“Yes, though perhaps not in this form, nor necessarily in this space. Class selection is always designed to put you in the head space where you can best make a choice, without undue external considerations affecting your mindset. For most, that is a place of comfort, and as you grow, that may change.” the construct explained.

Kaius nodded, though inwardly he doubted that he would ever find somewhere that felt as familiar and relaxing as the Sea. It was…pure, in a way that many other places were not. Sure, there were still dangers, but when you lived there your whole life, they were no worse than the risks of any other place.

Turning back to the glyph scrawled boulder, Kaius felt the system react to his intent and offer him a new notification.

**Ding! Latent Glyph of Drakthar Class Skill Available, would you like to proceed? This choice is pivotal and irrevocable.**

Kaius accepted.

Power thrummed, surging through his soul. Gasping at the electric energy that coursed through him, Kaius dropped into his soul space.

The class mesh that surrounded his soul pulsed; waves of power streaming out from the impossibly fine points that linked to his soul. Guided by the system's grand working, the power was corralled, woven into a dense ball.

He could taste the flavour of that energy. Aggressive, domineering. Calling out in joy for the glory of battle, and the effervescent thrill that accompanied the expulsion of energy.

Shining with an aura of gold, the threads of intent that linked the latent skill to his class compressed the ball of formless potential, shaping it bit by bit into a shard of power. It was crystalline, much like his general skills, and gleamed with the rich red of war banners and spilled blood, shimmering with the incandescence of honourable death.

Unlike his legacy skills, the coalescing shard did not take on a platinum glow. Golden light emanated from the working.

With a final shattering crunch, his skill was forged as a pulsing wave of anticipation burst free from the nexus, washing over every inch of his being.

His latest power floated away from his soul. It settled equidistant between the pillars of his aspects and the locked orbits of his legacy skills. With satisfied vigour, it started to rotate around the pyre of his soul, orbiting around the plane that split his soul top to bottom.

Formed and settled, it began its work in earnest.

Kaius started, feeling mana fly free from his pool. Snapping his eyes open, he flew from his soulspace and rejoined the world of the waking. Lifting his hands before his eyes, he leaned heavily on True Sight, ignoring the absence of two fingers in favour of focusing on the streams of mana that split and divided under his skin. Both of his hands were affected, glowing like a bonfire to his sight with the weight of mana that suffused them.

Woven under the intent of his skill, the mana took on new form, binding itself to his flesh according to higher mysteries and sacred geometries, leaving lines of white hot fire as the caustic arcane seared his nerves. Kaius winced.

It stung. Like fuck.

Still, he could bear the discomfort. Burning crimson light branded itself onto his skin, the glyph taking shape. It was cohesive, dense, and immeasurably more complex than anything he would have been able to inscribe himself, let alone design.

He struggled to even identify what it did, but he could at least tell that there were different segments to the formation. If he couldn’t do even that he would have been a poor excuse for a runewright’s son. A central array, shaped like splayed out shards of metal, was surrounded by a densely woven mesh of hexagrams, each vertice cutting the central array in twain as they crossed his flesh with eye watering fire. Jagged runes that whispered of power and the thrill of spilt blood scrawled around each line, somehow dipping through his flesh to wrap the glyph in a three dimensional matrix. It was mind bogglingly complex, and something that was only possible due to the formation being bound to his body and soul.

He gulped, suddenly realising that developing his own expertise on his glyphs was going to be a lot harder than he thought if they were three dimensional. The complexity and permutations alone… balancing mana flows along a flat plane was bad enough.

A final circle of runes flared into being, encircling the central formation at equidistant points. Each was as large as a fingerprint, and a thin line of runes linked each one into a decagram.

His mana surged, totally under the thrall of Drakthar, before his whole being…clicked. Shuddering in place. The burning lines of his glyph dimmed, leaving clean black elegance in their place that drenched the back of his hands and climbed up and around his wrists.

Clenching his fists, Kaius took in their shape. He … liked it. The brutal edges and whispered promises of violence. That said, he was going to need to buy some gloves if he wanted to avoid questions. It wouldn’t take long for people to start wondering what a fresh tier one was doing with body formations of unknown design.

He grinned. He couldn’t wait to test them out, but first he would need to get his first spell.

“Ready to move on?” His class guide asked, giving him a small smile.

“Born ready.” Kaius replied with a grin.

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