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

Kaius gathered with his team by the Pegleg’s hatch, watching the lord that stood at the tip of the vessel. Julian was free of his bindings, his weapons and storage ring fully returned. A sparrow sat on his shoulder, unnaturally still — a beastmaster watching them through the creature’s eyes.

It had been hours since they’d left the pass, the rupturing spires of glittering stone long since vanished over the horizon; replaced by the rolling hills and lush meadows that blanketed the duchy.

It was time for their latest, and rather questionable, ally to depart.

At the slightest flicker of Kaius’s will, the Pegleg started to slow as its deck rocked gently in motion with its mechanical steps.

He met Julian’s eyes. Kaius didn’t know what he was looking for in them. Guilt? A plot? He only found that inscrutable half smile. The man had gifted him the training sword he’d used when they’d shared forms — he wasn’t sure if he wanted it. Even if the lord told the truth, and it meant nothing to him, he wasn’t sure how he felt about a noble’s ‘gift’.

Still, Julian did seem far more…agreeable than any other time he’d interacted with them. Maybe it was just because he stood to gain something by being friendly with them.

“This is your stop,” Kaius said as the Pegleg came to a halt. “I’d like to say it's been a pleasure, but I try not to be a liar.”

Julian grinned. It looked only a little strained — but regardless, Kaius knew the man wasn’t actually that offended. He was playing it up for the bird. Julian leapt to the ground, making his way to the side of the road as the sparrow fluttered after him.

“Remember our agreement, guildhounds!” the lord said, looking up at them. “Help me find the Wellspring and defeat Brokenlight, and we can return together once we have taken the Archivist to safety!”

Kaius rolled his eyes, doing his best to play his part. It wasn’t very hard to sell his distaste. They might have newly aligned objectives, but they weren’t friends. Kaius found both the methods and the man distasteful.

“That was always our goal.”

Rehashing their discussion for their onlookers was tiresome, but necessary. The beastmaster would no doubt be relaying everything to Julian’s team — and his potential mole. When the lord returned to them, the groundwork would be laid for their future ‘abandonment’ — a feint to pull the hidden actors from the shadows.

Nodding to the lord one last time, the Pegleg lurched into motion, rapidly picking up speed as its metal legs clacked against the flagstones. A few more hours and they’d leave the road to cross overland, heading straight to Vainblood. It shouldn’t take more than a handful of days to reach the high mana zone, which would leave them just over a month to scour the place and find Brokenlight’s camp before the first week of winter.

“Are we really going to work with him?” Kenva said the second they were out of earshot. “I trust him less than the average back-alley mugger. They at least don’t pretend to like you while they take you for everything you have.”

Kaius shrugged. “Working with him doesn’t really change anything for us, and on the surface our goals are aligned.”

“Yeah, but what if he betrays us at the final moment?”

Kaius arched his brow. “We’ve already given him one chance, and I’m not about to roll over and wash my neck for someone else's pride. If he wants to squander our mercy, it’s his life.”

Turning his attention to the horison, Kaius felt a pang of longing. He’d dealt with far too much hellish politics in recent weeks, he’d had his fill of skulduggery to last him years.

A good fight, that’s what he needed — something Vainblood should hold in ready supply.

….

Kaius sat cross-legged under the shine of the midday sun, blessed with the presence of a rare sunny day. He breathed deep, feeling the flow of mana roiling within him — and gushing from his friend who was sitting next to him.

Making use of the top deck went beyond enjoying a little sun. He and Ianmus were practicing magic — explosively destabilised spells and soft couches didn’t mesh well together. There was little else for them to do while travelling, and Kaius had already finished his morning Cycling.

He spent a half hour at that every day: rousing his Aspects and moving his essence through them. Progress had been slow, but steady — until recently. He’d hit a bottleneck — all of them had to some degree. As much as he had hoped that it was because they were approaching their next stage of Refinement, Kaius knew that was not the case. His pillars were halfway to saturation at most.

Despite everything that had happened in their short time in Baanswell, nothing had really pushed him. Physically, spiritually, or emotionally. Xenanra had told them that refinement required fuel and heat to progress with any regularity. Since there seemed to be a dearth of earth-shattering epiphanies lying around on the side of the road, that left him the fires of battle.

Gods, he couldn’t wait for Vainblood.

But until then, he still had his Skills to work on.

Kaius focused on his hands, the sleeves of his tunic rolled up to reveal the jagged, cutting lines of Drakthar twining their way around his wrists and forearms. Tonal Weaving was a skill he used regularly, a cornerstone of his casting. There were depths to it. With every level, his control of his mana grew more deft, and more fine. It was more than just being able to marshall greater volumes of power, if anything, it was the reverse. Glyphbinding was not an art that relied on brute strength: on muscling vast quantities of mana to his command, and binding it to his Will.

It was delicate; a thing of dexterity and grace. More than anything, he found it was his growing ability to martial small quantities of mana quickly that impacted his inscription the most.

But there was an unbreakable limit, there. Practice and Skill levels made him faster, but there was only so much he could do with a single strand of mana. He’d been chipping away at that barrier for months now. Splitting his focus to inscribe more than one rune at a time was nightmarishly difficult, but it was possible. The monstrous growth of his mental stats, and the power of a Unique skill made it so.

He could just about manage it with a reasonable level of consistency with his first tier spells. Unfortunately, his second tier spells were far too complex — holding the image of them in his mind took up most of his focus when inscribing them.

That said, he had thought of another avenue of practice. If he could inscribe a spellhymn with multiple threads of mana, could he inscribe two at the same time? It was a tantalising prospect. If he worked with exact duplicates, inscribing the same rune for the two different copies of the same spell, it might prove a lesser burden. Once he got used to it, at least.

Pulling on his mana, Kaius spun out two threads of the energy. He brought to mind the dense runes of Hateful Nail, and got to work.

Only for one branch of his mana to fuzz as he struggled to keep two different copies of the spell in mind. It felt like trying to read two different books at the same time. His Glassmind helped, but not completely — it lacked the thought and intention of his main consciousness, something vital for fiddly work such as this.

Refusing to bow at the slightest sign of difficulty, Kaius simply clenched his jaw and kept at it. Green fields and golden trees slipped by without so much of a glance, the chill autumn wind forgotten as it rustled through his hair. All he saw was the spellhymn, and the two hellishly stubborn threads of mana that refused to obey his whim.

Runes burned on his flesh, scrawled one after the other. Without fail, one would stall, as his focus inadvertently slipped fully to one of his inscriptions. Blisters bubbled on his skin as mana dissolved with petulant violence, dissatisfied at his absent attention to their needs — only for the wounds to be wiped away in a surge of itching heat.

A silent chime sounded in his mind. A small, much familiar distraction — but still a distraction. Mana bucked in his grip, and Kaius jolted as his two partially finished spells pulsed violently as they started to destabilise.

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He huffed, snatching up his mana in a vice grip for what felt like the millionth time. To his surprise, both inscriptions stabilised — an achievement, if a pitiful one. He gained nothing if he had to flip back and forth between them. In the absolute best-case scenario, that would take just as long as inscribing them one after the other.

“Trouble?” Ianmus asked with a small grunt.

Kaius looked over to his friend, seeing sweat beading on his brow. A densely packed disc of bound mana hovered over his palm. It was made of four concentric circles — the inner most was his solar keyseal, followed by the silver brilliance of his two lunar ones, then his earliest: a construction of pure, unaspected mana. That final keyseal was simplistic and crude compared to the near-fractal finery of the inner three keyseal’s sacred geometry.

As a group, they siphoned mana from the air around them — kicking up subtle eddy currents for a dozen strides in every direction.

“A bit,” Kaius replied, watching with interest as the layered keyseals in his friend's hand warbled unsteadily. It seemed he wasn’t the only one having problems. “I was trying my hand at inscribing two copies of the spell in parallel, but even with all of my advantages, I can’t seem to stop switching between them.”

Ianmus cracked a grin. He cursed a moment later as his outermost keyseal collapsed in a flash of light. Sighing, he clenched his open palm and dismissed his other constructs.

“It’s a common issue. I can only really manage it because of the specialisation of my Glassmind, and even then it is a poor equivalent to the Archmages who have practised such a thing for decades or centuries. Intelligence and Willpower might improve your mental abilities, but they are still Stats — they only improve what’s already there. Few creatures are built to think about two things at once.”

Kaius grunted; by his friend’s own admission, it was possible.

“Just keep at it,” Ianmus said, smiling when he noticed Kaius’s dissatisfaction. “Stats do allow new capabilities, but without the direct and explicit aid of the System, it is simply something you’ll need to practice.”

That went without saying — but he supposed Ianmus was right. He was no stranger to hard work, and it was a good work out for Tonal Weaving. The Skill level he’d gotten for an afternoon's work could attest to that.

“What’ve you been working on?” Kaius asked, wanting to move on from his exercise in frustration.

“Just…feeling things out.”

“Oh?”

He could understand the sentiment — puzzling through his glyphs was a frustrating endeavour at times. He had no master, no expert to rely on when he hit difficulties. If anything, Ianmus had it worse. Glyphbinding was divergent from standard runework, but it was still runework. Keyseal conjuration was unlike anything else — somewhere between glyphbinding and sorcery in terms of its fundamentals.

Ianmus nodded. “My seals are wonderful, but they do have drawbacks. Each one is stable, but there is a cost to them. Investing a portion of my mana into their creation strains my Will, even after I have finished casting them. Not too much compared to the initial channeling — and nowhere near as much as casting sorcerous spells — but it does exist.”

“Four’s your limit?” Kaius asked, remembering the flicker in Ianmus’s outermost keyseal.

“Three, really. My first keyseal is a far simpler construction. Even then, having three active neuters my ability to free cast sorceries. The problem should ease as my willpower grows, but I expect that it will always be present, as my Skills grow in rarity and tier. It seems I will face a shadow of your own difficulties — having to pick which ones to use as my repertoire expands.”

He wasn’t so sure about that — or at least, Ianmus would be far less constrained that he was.

“Won’t you still be able to switch them out, if we need it?”

Ianmus wavered his hand back and forth, watching the rolling grass of the wilds spill past them. “Technically yes, but the more keyseals I have active, the slower I am at casting another. Plus, they still need to draw in power from the surroundings before I can actually cast spells through them. I’m not regretting the drawbacks, but it will impact our strategies.”

Kaius grinned, leaning over to slap his friend on the back. The mage rocked forward with a grunt.

“What was it you said? ‘It’s just a matter of practice?’”

Ianmus rolled his eyes — but still smiled.

“Exactly.”

Silence fell over them, and Kaius allowed himself a moment to just relax and enjoy the tepid heat of the sun. It wouldn’t be long until winter, and that meant more rain, and more clouds.

As he sat there, his thoughts drifted to his status — he still needed to check his gains from his recent clashes in the pass. He pulled it up, checking his progress in full.

Status:

Name: Kaius

Dynasty: Unterstern

Age: 20

Race: Human (Dynastic [Greater], Greater Beastblooded) - +1 Con, Str, Wil; +3 free stats per level

Layer Reached: 29

Class: Runeblade Hellion - +6 Int; +4 Con, Str, Wil; +2 Vit, Dex per level

Level: 254

Resources:

Health - 18,690/18,690 (120.8/min)

Stamina - 18,510/18,510 (135.1/min)

Mana - 23,350/23,350 (168.7/min)

Free Mana - 3,000/3,000

Reserved Mana - 20,350

Stats:

Constitution - 1869 (900 + 150 + 78%)

Vitality - 1208 (529 + 150 + 78%)

Strength - 1851 (890 + 150 + 78%)

Dexterity - 1351 (609 + 150 + 78%)

Intelligence - 2335 (1024 + 180 + 94%)

Willpower: - 1687 (690 + 180 + 94%)

Stat Points: 0

Aspects:

Pillar Corporus: The Struggler’s Madness

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