Chương 50: Rune partner

Alex took the wall again, and this time it wasn't caution. Yesterday the crew had hit eleven, all of them, and Alex wanted his profession up to ten before anything else, because the rank-up at ten was where Rune Scribe would evolve, and the last two evolutions on his sheet had done more for his fighting than any level had. The magical half of him had turned out to be the half that mattered, and he'd stopped being surprised by that somewhere around the fake star he'd thrown off this same wall a few nights ago.

He'd cleared it with Katelin the day before. She'd taken it well, better than well, because she was back in the dungeon with the group today and there was a new set to her shoulders that Alex liked seeing. Whatever had happened out there, she'd come back more certain of herself, and he'd told her so, and she'd told him to stop being weird about it, which was the closest thing to a thank-you she had.

He set up in his usual stretch of open ground with the pen and a stack of metal sheets, and got about ten minutes into the rune before Cassandra came up the wall and waved. He waved back. They were past strangers now, somewhere in the loose country of acquaintances, and she came over with the specific energy of a person who had been waiting to tell him something.

"You leveled," Alex said. It wasn't a guess.

"Yesterday. With my group." She sat down a careful distance away, close enough to talk, not close enough to crowd the work.

"That's actually part of why I came. I picked Rune Scribe." Alex looked up from the sheet.

"The profession."

"The profession." She said it a little defensively, the way she said most things she'd decided and expected to defend.

"I watched you do this all afternoon a few days ago, and it looked, I don't know. Quiet. Everything out here is loud and fast and trying to kill you, and you were just sitting on a wall making light with a pen, and it looked like the first restful thing I'd seen since this started." She shrugged.

"And the packet says it stacks Intelligence and Wisdom, which my mage craft could use. So. Restful and useful. I picked it."

"Both of those are true," Alex said, and meant it.

"It's the only thing I do out here that doesn't feel like work."

"Do you mind having students?." He almost said he wasn't qualified, and then didn't, because she'd clearly already decided and he'd only be arguing for the sake of it. The truth was he'd never taught anyone anything but a deadlift. His entire teaching resume was spotting friends at the college gym, telling a nervous freshman where to put his hands on a bar, and there'd been something he genuinely liked about that, watching a person find a thing their body could do that it couldn't do the week before.

He missed it a little, if he was honest. He hadn't expected to.

"You'll need the language eventually," he said.

"Orravyn Script. It's expensive, I burned most of a fortune on it. But you don't need it yet. I can walk you through everything I know before you'd even hit the wall where the language matters, so save your points until you can afford it clean."

"That's generous."

"Just tying to be a decent teacher. You getting good will also be help, because then I have somebody to work with Instead of guessing alone." He turned a fresh sheet toward her and set the pen down between them.

"Light first. It's the one that taught me everything else. Watch the way my mana moves and also the shape, both are cruciall." He walked her through it. It was harder than he expected, and not because she was slow. She wasn't. It was the gap between knowing a thing and saying it, and Alex kept reaching for words and finding that the knowledge in his hands didn't come with language attached, that he'd absorbed the rune from a bought packet and had to reverse-engineer his own instincts to explain them.

He'd import it and just know. She had to build it stroke by stroke off his fumbling description, and the fact that she got anywhere at all was mostly her. But she got somewhere. By the third attempt her strokes had slowed down and gotten deliberate, methodical in a way that reminded him of his own calligraphy nights, and something in the way she leaned into the work told him she'd been right about it. This was going to be her quiet thing. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road.

If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. He didn't spend the whole day on her. He couldn't, he had his own wall to climb, and he told her as much and she waved him off and kept practicing on her own sheet while he worked his. They fell into a rhythm of it, two people a few feet apart making something out of metal, occasionally one of them holding up a ruined sheet and the other saying what went wrong. Somewhere in there he asked about her class.

"Crystal Mage," she said.

"Uncommon." Alex looked up.

"It's great that you got what you want" I was quite surprised when I saw the option." She almost smiled." And the affinity I got was also interesting." She pulled a small structure of mana into being over her palm, a faceted little shard, and it wasn't clear or white the way the Crystal Shard skill had always made them. It was pink. A soft rose color shot through the whole thing.

"Pink Diamond. Peak tier. That's the affinity, and every crystal skill I own turned this color the moment it landed and got noticeably harder to break. Stronger on defense specifically. Probably due to the fact that it's some diamond derivative""Peak," Alex said, and kept his face even.

"Peak." She dismissed the shard.

"Which I'm told is a big deal, though nobody can tell me how big, because the packet stops at High and just leaves everyone above it to guess." Alex sat with that longer than he let show. She was the third person he'd now watched come home with a tier the packet didn't print. Liam, twice over. Mia. And now Cassandra, who wasn't even family, which broke the private theory he'd been building that his bloodline was somehow doing this. It wasn't just them.

He wondered, not for the first time, whether Perfect was as rare as he'd been treating it, whether the whole camp was about to start blooming with words above the top of the chart as more people crossed ten. If Peak was turning up in people who weren't his family, then maybe the thing he'd been guarding so carefully was less a secret and more a head start. Then again, nobody had said Perfect. Not once, not anywhere. Peak kept appearing. Perfect stayed his alone.

He decided to keep treating it that way until something told him otherwise.

"It's a big deal," he said.

"Congratulations. Genuinely. Your crystals not shattering is going to matter more than you think the first time something big hits them."

"That's the plan." She went back to her sheet, pleased, and didn't push him for his own affinity, which he noticed and appreciated. She'd asked once, days ago, and he'd closed the door, and she hadn't tried the handle since. It was a small thing. It made the rest of this easier. The day went the way he'd wanted it to. His scribe class climbed twice that day, level five and then level six, the runes coming steadier as his hand caught up to his ambition. The second level brought a skill with it.

[New Profession Skill: Rune Optimization (Uncommon)] He read the description twice and grinned at his sheet. It refined a finished rune after the fact, trimming the wasted strokes, tightening the whole structure so the same inscription ran on less mana and held its shape longer. It was, in the plainest terms, a way to make everything he'd already written better without rewriting it, and for a profession he was pouring hours into, that compounded in a direction he liked a great deal.

He worked Polearm Mastery between sheets, giving it more attention than he used to, because Jeremy had made a very persuasive argument for it across Alex's entire beaten body a few nights back and the point had landed. He ran thermal and gravity together until they cooperated, and kept mana manipulation going underneath all of it, the wasteful freehand kind that taught him something the pen never would.

And Cassandra stayed most of the day, working her own sheets, and by the time the light went orange she could make a light rune hold on the fourth try, which had taken him the same number of attempts his first night. They got closer over the hours in the ordinary way two people get closer when they're bad at the same new thing at the same time, comparing failures, stealing each other's small tricks. It was good to have it.

He'd been working the runes alone since he picked the profession, guessing in the dark, and now there was someone a step behind him on the same road, which meant soon enough there'd be someone beside him. He thought about the mastery question as he packed up. Two scribes could work out things one couldn't. She'd find approaches he wouldn't, coming at it from a mage's angle instead of a warrior's, and he'd find ones she wouldn't, and the profession would move faster for both of them.

"Same time tomorrow?" she asked, gathering her ruined sheets.

"I'm out with the crew tomorrow. Hunting." He slung his kit.

"But after. There's a lot I can teach you that isn't light. Explosion runes, sharpening. The archers are going to want both of those on their arrows before long, and I can't write every shaft in this camp myself." He paused.

"Two of us could."

"Then teach me the useful ones next."

"That's the plan," Alex said, and slung his kit.

"Alex." She'd stopped gathering her sheets.

"Thank you for today. You didn't have to spend a whole day of your own leveling teaching me, and you did it anyway. So. Thank you."

"It's, ah." Something went briefly wrong with his usual ease, and he found himself looking at the middle distance instead of at her.

"No problem. Really. It was a good day." He left her to her sheets before it could get any stranger, and went to find his family before the morning came and took him back out into the world.