B3 Chapter 319: Sanctuary, Finale

Kaius leaned back against the wall of the safe room, his arms folded in his lap as he took slow breaths.

His spar with Porkchop had worked out a lot of the tense energy that had lingered after his fight with the rootborers. It had been helpful too — he’d gotten a much better handle on his new Mercurial Reversal, and had gained a couple of levels for it on top of that.

As he’d grown used to the sudden surge of speed it presented, his parries had grown less and less wooden — more fluid. Thankfully, managing the sapping strength and redirected power was much simpler. The drain only made controlling his opponents swing easier to manage, and the empowered riposte was less a boost to physical strength than it was a burst of hardened energy that projected from his sword point upon impact.

Unfortunately, there hadn’t been much of an opportunity to try out his Hymnfocus as much as he would have liked. He’d only had two remaining combat inscriptions, so once he’d burned through his reserves of Stamina they’d elected to take a break.

Now that his Mana was full, it was time to inscribe once more. He planned on an even split of his Drakthar spells, and Zone of Discombobulation — the more variety he got to try infusing into his blade, the quicker he would learn.

It wouldn’t take long — not with how he had grown. Every point of Intelligence increased the rate at which he could pull on his Mana pool, and every one of Willpower increased the power and granularity of his control. Spinning his mana into the fine three-dimensional runes of his spells was easy now.

Even without Tonal Weaving and Resonance Amplification, the mana control he’d struggled with so much a year ago would have been as easy as lifting a feather.

But he did have those Skills, and they had grown much. When he’d first gained his class, holding each spell inscription in his mind had been like trying to wrestle a greased hog. Every time he had latched onto a single fine detail, another would slip free — leaving him wrestling with a hazy and indistinct image of the work he was trying to follow.

It forced him to slow — recheck his work constantly as he gnawed his cheeks in worry he’d made a mistake with runes completely unintelligible to him.

A fact that was only worsened by his low stats and low level Resonance Amplification. The tight weaves and exacting precision of Vesryn runework had played hell on his focus — each rune had been an exercise in frustration, his Mana bucking in his grip as he had twisted it in on itself to form rune after rune.

The end result had been that reinscribing a full suite of spells had taken him an hour or more. For less than ten gods’ scorned inscriptions! Such a pace was almost unimaginably slow to him now.

No longer did his mind ache as he strived to keep a full spell in his memory — they hung there as clear as if they had been made of silver wire. No longer did he agonise over every rune as he painstakingly carved them hairsbreadth by hairsbreadth — he stamped them whole cloth, churning out spells in less than a minute.

With his current Mana pool, he could inscribe nearly a hundred Hateful Nails. He’d never exactly sat down and timed it, but he doubted it would take any longer than three-quarters of an hour to finish them all — maybe even less.

A salient change — but not the only one, nor potentially even the most important.

With the growth of Tonal Weaving had come understanding. Each of his glyphs and spells was as familiar as looking at his own reflection. True, he still lacked comprehension of the actual Vesryn runic language — but he could feel how they fit together.

The stability of each curve, the exact tolerances of each stroke of his mana, and the compatibility of each three dimensional rune that linked into its neighbours.

He called his glyphs into his mind’s eye. Drakthar, Aelina, Vyrthane, Eirnith. Each shone like the moon on a clear night as he turned them over, inspecting them from all angles.

Stretching his mind a little further, Kaius called his spells into being, each one sitting below their parent glyph. He marveled at their complexity — the depth of work that must have gone into devising not just them, but the very language that they were built from.

He’d only brushed up against the edges of the Vesryn order — a few tidbits learnt from skill and class epigraphs all he had to go off. One thing was obvious: they were a titanic force, wherever they might be. Heroic initiates, and members who spread far and wide, pursuing their order’s aims — hells, bonding with greater beasts was normalised!

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If that wasn’t enough, they were an order of magical prodigies. They could be nothing else to have developed such a complex craft.

Kaius might not have known the depths of Father’s true strength — likely would never know — but one thing had been certain. The man had been a consummate runewright, furthered the art far beyond the imaginings of even the average master. Kaius’s blade was proof of that. Growth weapons could only be made by the strongest of runesmiths — those that blended runecraft with metallurgy.