Chương 74: The Impossible Rune

The idea would not leave Alex alone, which was how he knew it was worth chasing. Cassandra had said it almost offhand, days ago, a way to store mana, and it had lodged in him the way the best problems did, turning over in the back of his mind while he did everything else.

By the time he and Cassandra sat down to actually look at it, he'd already half-convinced himself it could be done, and then they laid the whole thing out on paper, every rune it would need, every constraint, and the half-conviction met the reality and had a hard time of it. Because it was the most complicated piece of rune-craft either of them had ever attempted, by a wide margin, and neither of them was sure it was possible.

"Let's look over this again," Alex said Cassandra tapped the paper. She'd thought about this more than he had, had clearly been chewing on it since the day she'd floated the idea, and she went down the list like a woman who'd already lost sleep over it.

"It needs many runes perfectly connected. around eight, and they have to work interconnected." She started counting them off.

"You need a mana absortionion rube, first, then a Containment rune, or the mana just leaks back out as fast as you put it in. Then Stability, because stored mana wants to surge, and a surge in a container full of the stuff is not something you want to be standing next to." She glanced up.

"That's three, and we haven't even gotten to the useful part yet."

"Getting it back out."

"Getting it back out. Which is its own set. A Flow rune so the mana moves inside the chamber instead of just pooling dead. A Channel rune to exit, an actual pathway out. A Regulation rune to control how fast it goes in and comes out, because without it you either can't fill it or it all comes out at once." She sat back.

"And wrapped around all of that, a Reinforcement rune to protect the whole structure from the pressure of the mana it's holding, and a Seal rune to lock the entire enchantment together so it holds as one thing instead of eight things arguing." She looked at him.

"Eight runes. Minimum. On one object. Working in concert. We have never put more than three or four on anything, and even that took us both." Alex felt a drop of mental sweat drip from his forehead. Runes did not like company.

He'd learned that early and relearned it every time he tried to layer enchantments on a weapon, each additional rune making the whole thing exponentially harder, not just to inscribe but to keep stable, because runes near each other interacted, bled into each other, and a stroke that meant one thing alone meant something subtly different sitting next to another rune. Two was manageable. Three was work.

Four was the edge of what either of them had done, and it had taken both of them a full day and several ruined attempts. Eight, packed tight enough to function as a single device, was not four plus four. It was a different order of problem entirely, and Alex looked at the list and felt, honestly, a little daunted, which was not a feeling he had much anymore. But daunted wasn't impossible. And he had two things now that he hadn't had a month ago.

Name: Alex Morningstar Age: 21 Race: Human Class Level: 17 Class: Star-Touched Warrior (Rare) Profession: Rune Scribe, Level 16 Strength: 100 Dexterity: 69 Constitution: 75 Perception: 55 Intelligence: 88 Wisdom: 85 Affinity: Star (Perfect) Skills: Star Forged Body (Rare), Meteorslash (Rare), Proto Star Core (Rare), Solar Empowerment (Rare), Planetary Lock (Rare), Explosive Step (Uncommon), Regeneration (Uncommon), Reinforce Body (Common), Boost (Common), Identify (Common), Glaive Mastery (Apprentice), Mana Manipulation (Novice), Thermal Manipulation (Adept), Gravity Manipulation (Adept) Profession Skills: Engrave (Uncommon), Focus (Uncommon), Rune Optimization (Uncommon), Rune Insight (Uncommon), Rune Repair (Uncommon), Rune Compression (Uncommon), Rune Extraction (Uncommon) Cultivation: none Bloodline: None He was Level seventeen.

His class had made him a Strength monster, a hundred points in it, a number that would have been mythology in the old world. But the thing that stopped him, every time, was the number underneath it. Intelligence, which was encroaching on Strength's territory. He was a warrior by class and a scholar by the numbers, and the reason was the profession, the quiet second track that had been stacking Int and Wisdom into him with every rune he learned, until the warrior who threw suns had the mind of a mage to power them.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. That was the first thing he had. A mana pool and a mind deep enough to maybe, maybe, hold eight runes in his head at once. The second was newer. His profession had handed him two skills at its last rank that he hadn't fully appreciated until he stared at this list.

Rune Extraction, which let him cleanly pull a rune out of an object without wrecking everything around it, which meant, for the first time, that a mistake wasn't fatal; he could remove a bad rune and try again instead of scrapping the whole piece. And Rune Compression, which let him reduce the space a finished rune took up, tighten it down, fit it into less room than it wanted. On anything else that was a convenience.

On this, on a device that needed eight runes crammed onto one container without them strangling each other, it might be the only reason the thing was possible at all. Compression could give each rune the room it needed by making all of them smaller. It was the difference between eight runes fighting for space and eight runes each having just enough. He looked at the sheet a moment longer, and his eyes caught on the number that always soured him. Perception. Fifty-five.

And it had been thirty not long ago, before he'd taken every free point he'd saved and poured the whole reserve into it, twenty-six points in one go, dragging it up from dangerous to merely bad. It was still his weakness. It was still the stat that lagged everything, that had nearly cost him against fast enemies more than once, and the thing that gnawed at him was that he didn't think he could fix it. Strength came from fighting. Intelligence came from the runes.

His body and his mind both had engines driving them up. But Perception had no engine, nothing he did trained it, and he'd spent his entire free-point reserve just to make it survivable. He'd need thirty more points to make it good, and he could not, for the life of him, see where thirty more points came from. Free points at level-up, a trickle. He couldn't train his way to it the way he trained everything else.

It just sat there, a hole in him he'd patched but not filled, and he knew, with a certainty that bothered him, that someday something fast and clever was going to find that hole before he'd worked out how to close it. He set the sheet aside. That was a problem for another day, and this was the problem in front of him.

"We can try it," he said.

"I think. With compression, and both of us, and if we're patient. But there's another problem""The container," Cassandra said, because of course she'd gotten there too.

"The container. Runes wear down whatever they're written on. You know that better than anyone. Half your day is repairing them because the material degrades under the mana. And this thing isn't going to fire a rune now and then. It's going to hold a mana load constantly, pressure on the container every second of every day." He shook his head.

"That'll eat through anything soft. Store metal, ordinary stuff, it'll degrade to nothing in days. We need a container with real durability. Something that can take runes carrying that kind of load and not fall apart."

"Which means expensive metal."

"Yeah. We should get it from the store, but we got Uncle Bartholomew." Alex rubbed his face.

"So it's eight runes we've never managed on a metal we can barely afford, and if we get any part of it wrong, the whole thing either leaks, surges, or dissolves." Cassandra was quiet for a moment, looking at the list, and then she did the thing that had made Alex like her as a work partner in the first place, which was that she didn't flinch from a hard problem. She leaned into it.

"So we go to Bartholomew," she said.

"We should probably get the new scribe in on this too. More hands means more attempts before we all lose our minds. And we accept going in that we're probably going to fail a lot before we don't." She looked up at him.

"Because if it works, Alex. If it actually works. This could be so revolutionary" Alex looked at the list, eight runes deep and probably beyond them, and felt the specific pull he always felt toward a thing that was just barely too hard.

"Yeah," he said.

"It will be." They went to find Bartholomew that afternoon, and Alex carried, as he always did now, the small weight of the return talisman in his pocket, the one-use token Liam had made him, keyed to the main gate, that would pull him home from a distance if everything went wrong. Liam had finished the gate at last and started turning out the talismans, one per person for the crew, and Alex had stored his away without much thought at the time.

He thought about it now, walking to ask his uncle for metal they could barely spare to build a thing that probably wouldn't work. Liam had built the impossible thing. The door to nowhere that pulled people out of death. If a seventeen-year-old could argue a pile of sand into being a location, then two Rune Scribes could argue runes into being a mana battery. Probably.

Bartholomew heard them out, looked at the list, looked at the two of them, and sighed the sigh of a craftsman being asked to spend his best material on a long shot.

"How much of my good metal," he said, "are you going to waste finding out this doesn't work?"

"A lot," Alex admitted.

"Probably a lot." Bartholomew looked at the list one more time. Then he looked at his nephew, who had done the impossible many times, and shook his head.

"Fine," the smith said.

"But you're going to owe me the best weapon I ever make, and you're going to enchant it for free, and if you blow up my forge, I will..." Uncle Bartholomew couldn't find his words because before, something like a soft threat, but now, well, he couldn't really threaten Alex.

"We won't blow anything up, promise," Alex said, and it was done, and the impossible project had a metal to fail on and a team to fail with, and Alex went to bed that night with eight runes turning in his head and a problem worth the size of it in front of him for the first time in weeks.