Chương 43: Explode

The metal sheet was still glowing when Alex woke up, which answered a question he hadn't asked. He lay there a moment watching it, a patient little sun sitting beside his bedroll after a full night of burning, and made a note. Metal held a rune until the mana ran out, which was as good as forever compared to paper, but the burning still ate into the sheet a little each time. Better medium. Not a permanent one. Then he pulled up his status, and got a second surprise before he'd even sat up. The numbers had moved.

Not from a level, he hadn't gained one since the class, but from work, small gains scattered across the sheet where he'd been putting hours in. Constitution had climbed the most and he understood exactly why, and the understanding was not comfortable. Constitution grew from damage. From standing in things.

From a night two days ago where a G rank had opened him up and stopped his heart in a field, and apparently the system had looked at all that and quietly awarded points, the way it awarded everything, without asking whether the price had been reasonable. Strength had barely moved on its own. That one stung a little.

He'd been swinging a glaive every free hour for two weeks and the number had crawled, which told him the easy gains from raw practice were behind him and everything from here got paid for in months instead of days. Not that it mattered much, when he looked at where the real growth came from. Star-Touched Warrior handed him seven Strength every single level. Seven.

His own training added a rounding error on top of that, and the gap between the two was almost funny, a month of daily effort worth less than one trip across the level line. The class was the engine. He was a passenger who occasionally leaned on the wheel. The rest of the sheet told a gentler version of the same story.

His class fed him Intelligence and Wisdom two at a time, and Rune Scribe stacked more on top, on its own separate track, and that track was the one he could climb sitting down on the days his body needed rest. His mind was going to keep filling out whether or not he ever swung the glaive again, and that suited him, because more Intelligence meant a deeper mana pool and more Wisdom meant it refilled faster, and his entire bottleneck for two weeks had been mana. Every experiment cut short by an empty tank.

The two stats he'd never asked for were quietly dismantling the wall he kept running into. The system had built him a strange engine. He'd stopped expecting it to build the one he'd have designed. Which led straight to the day's actual decision. The dungeon was the obvious use of a morning. It was also, he was increasingly sure, the wrong one. A day of runs would give him maybe a level and change.

A day of runes would give him profession levels, and profession levels gave him Intelligence and Wisdom, and those gave him everything else, and somewhere in that loop was a version of him who could hold a compressed star long enough to finish the thought. He was still working through it when Katelin found him.

"I'm going with the group today," she said, in the tone of someone who had already decided and was informing the record.

"To the dungeon. Not with you."

"Okay."

"Because I want to actually push my healing, and standing on a wall next to a man who never gets injured is the worst possible place to do that." She adjusted her kit strap.

"You are extremely bad for my profession."

"That's a compliment shaped like an insult."

"It's an insult shaped like a compliment," Katelin said.

"Try not to explode anything important." She was gone before he could answer, and Alex found himself smiling at his tent wall for the second morning in a row. Such a pain in the rear. How was a kid that feisty. He caught his father at the gate and laid out the plan, skills over levels, a full day of rune work and manipulation instead of a dungeon run. Chris listened, nodded once, and didn't argue, which meant he'd already reached the same conclusion or trusted his son to have reached a defensible one.

The scouting party was already forming up behind him, four people packing light, no heavy armor, the fast quiet team Chris had described last night going out to look at the world and touch nothing in it. The gate itself was under construction, which Alex noticed properly for the first time. The wall had been getting quietly better all week, TP flowing into it from every purse in the camp, and today there were people up on scaffolding widening the gate housing and reinforcing the frame.

It was ugly, functional work, and it grated on him slightly to see that much of the settlement's points going into something that just sat there. He examined the feeling and threw it out. A wall that had held two waves was not a thing to be irritated by. He'd stood in front of a hundred sheepfolk yesterday specifically because there was a wall behind him worth standing in front of. He set up in his usual stretch of open ground, greeted the handful on watch duty, and got to work with two goals. Level the profession.

Upgrade Blazing Core. The runes came first, and he went hunting through the Orravyn basics for something with teeth. Light was a lamp. Heat was a hot plate. What he wanted was something that would matter to a person standing in a fight, and he found it three entries down. Explode. The description was almost disappointing in its plainness. The rune took a charge. When the charge finished, roughly a second later, the rune released everything it held at once.

That was the whole mechanism, and Alex read it twice and felt his brain start assembling applications before he'd even laid a stroke. It was a bomb. It was a small, cheap, writable bomb, and every archer in this camp could carry a dozen. His first attempt failed badly. The explode rune ran to three times the strokes of light, with tolerances that punished him twice in the first four lines, and he sat back with a ruined sheet feeling the gap between what he could imagine and what his hand could currently execute.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. The second failed. The third failed differently, which was at least progress. [Rune Scribe: Level 3] [New Profession Skill: Focus (Uncommon)] [Focus: Narrows the scribe's attention to the stroke at hand, steadying the body and quieting external stimulus. Duration and effect scale with Wisdom.] Alex activated it out of curiosity and nearly lost his balance, because the world went away.

Not literally, he could still hear the camp, could still feel the wind, but all of it moved somewhere far back behind glass, and what remained was the pen and the metal and the line he was drawing on it. His hand steadied. His breathing slowed without instruction. The tremor he hadn't known was in his grip simply stopped, and the fourth attempt at the explode rune came off the pen in one long unhurried sequence, every stroke landing exactly where the script demanded. The rune took.

He charged it with the smallest trickle he could manage, watched the strokes brighten, counted one, and threw it into the empty ground beyond the practice yard, and the sheet went off with a sharp flat crack and a puff of dirt about the size of a dinner plate. Small. Very small. And it had worked, and Alex sat looking at the scorch mark with the specific hunger of a man who had just found a new lever. The applications came fast.

Give it to the archers, obviously, that was the whole answer, an arrow that opened when it landed instead of just making a hole. Give it to warriors too, small plates they could charge and throw. Give it to anyone standing on that wall who wanted to make the ground in front of the gate less pleasant. The problem was size. He'd written this thing across a full sheet of metal, and the strokes had needed all of that room.

An arrowhead was a fraction of that space with the same number of lines in it, which meant the tolerances went from punishing to absurd, and Alex looked at his hand and then at the borrowed arrow he'd need and understood that today was going to be long. He also decided, right there, to make it longer. Because the pen was a crutch. A useful one, a good one, but he had noticed something yesterday and it had been nagging at him since.

When he engraved with mana off his own fingertip, badly, wastefully, he was doing mana manipulation, the exact skill he'd been failing to improve for two weeks. The pen made the work clean and taught him nothing. His finger made the work terrible and taught him everything. So he put the pen down and went back to failing on purpose. It cost him hours. Working freehand he couldn't produce a light rune, let alone an explode rune, and he burned through mana pushing shapes that fell apart before they finished.

But he could feel it happening. The lines came out of his fingertip a fraction thinner each time, a fraction less of the mana hissing off into the air, his control tightening by degrees so small he'd have missed them a week ago. Around midday he went and found the archer on the wall, one of Cassandra's people, a lean guy who had been very carefully not staring at Alex all morning.

"I need to borrow arrows. Probably a lot of them, but I'll pay for every one I break." The guy blinked.

"What are you doing to them?"

"Trying to write a bomb on the tip." There was a pause.

"You can have some," the archer said. Getting it onto steel took the rest of the day, and it took the pen, because freehand on a surface that small turned out to be a fantasy. Alex ruined eleven arrowheads. He ruined the twelfth by rushing the final stroke, and the thirteenth by breathing wrong, and somewhere around the eighteenth he stopped counting and just worked, Focus running whenever the mana allowed, the script shrinking under his hand as his precision grudgingly caught up to the demand.

The sun was low and orange by the time one of them held.

"Alright." He handed the arrow back to its owner, who had been sitting cross-legged nearby for the last two hours making no attempt to pretend he had somewhere else to be.

"This one's charged to almost nothing, so it should be small. Feed it mana, and the second the strokes go bright, shoot it. Do not hold it after that. There's no safe place to be standing with a live one."

"How much mana?"

"Less than you think." The archer drew, fed it, and Alex watched the tiny script flare gold along the arrowhead. The shot went out over the field, and about forty meters into open ground the arrow came apart with a crack and a bloom of dirt, shards of shaft snapping outward in every direction. Small. Genuinely small, less than a mage's bolt in raw damage.

And Alex looked at where it had happened and thought about a level nine sheepfolk taking that in the gut instead of a hole in the shoulder, and the little fragments going where the arrow no longer needed to be. The archer was on his feet.

"Can you do more?"

"Not today."

"Tomorrow?"

"Maybe," Alex said, and found that he meant it, and that it didn't annoy him at all. That was the strange part. Somebody wanting something from him usually landed as a weight, and this had landed as an errand he was looking forward to. Runes were the quietest hours he'd had since the system arrived. Sitting with a pen and a sheet of metal was the one activity that put the field and the fortress and the burials somewhere behind him, and being asked to do more of it was not a burden. It was an excuse.

Which reminded him that the group was going out tomorrow. Alex thought about Mia at the treeline, cool and quiet and steadily lethal, putting arrow after arrow exactly where he was about to swing, and about what she could do with a quiver where every shaft opened on impact. He worked until well past dark. Twenty arrows, in the end, which was more than he'd have believed possible that morning, each of them engraved by hand and pen and Focus and stubbornness.

Seventeen of them were like the test shot, light charges, small cracking bursts meant to be spent freely. The last three he took his time with, pushing as much mana into the engraving as the arrowheads could structurally hold, because the guide had been clear that the mana invested at creation set the ceiling for everything the rune could ever do.

Those three came out with a faint mana glow along the head, and he set them apart from the others and made a mental note to tell Mia which was which before she nocked one at somebody's face. [Rune Scribe: Level 4] Two levels. That was the whole day's harvest, three and four, both arriving on the back of the explode rune, and Alex sat with it a while before deciding it made sense. Levels one and two had come nights ago, the first time he ever wrote anything.

Everything since had been repetition, and the profession had paid him nothing for it, right up until this afternoon when he cracked a script he'd never written before and it handed him two levels almost at once. One pattern, clear now. Rune Scribe paid for new ground and ignored the rest, no matter how many hours he put in or how tired his hand was at the end of them. Which meant every level from here would cost him a script he didn't know yet, and the scripts were not going to get easier.

He pulled up his sheet in the dark to see where the work had actually landed him.

Name: Alex Morningstar Age: 21 Race: Human Class Level: 10 Class: Star-Touched Warrior (Rare) Profession: Rune Scribe, Level 4 (H) Strength: 46 Dexterity: 36 Constitution: 38 Perception: 23 Intelligence: 35 Wisdom: 32 Skills: Star Forged Body (Rare), Cleaving Strike (Uncommon), Blazing Core (Uncommon), Identify (Common), Reinforce Body (Common), Taunt (Common), Boost (Common), Polearm Mastery (Novice), Mana Manipulation (Novice), Thermal Manipulation (Novice), Gravity Manipulation (Novice) Profession Skills: Engrave (Uncommon), Focus (Uncommon) Body Cultivation: None Mana Cultivation: None Bloodline: None Intelligence had nearly caught Perception and left it in the dust weeks ago, and now it sat just under Dexterity, closing.

He looked at that and thought about the fact that a month ago he had been a man whose entire professional identity was being large. Then he looked at the last three lines, the three that had said None since the white room and had never once explained themselves, and set them aside with everything else the system refused to elaborate on. His mana had been climbing back all evening. There was a lot of night left. Alex stood up, rolled his shoulders, and cast Blazing Core.