Rune Seeker

The Ex-General – like it heard Hiral’s declaration – narrowed its eyes at him, and its arm flexed as if to pop Grandmother’s head off her shoulders. Except, its hand didn’t work. Mainly because it had been Separated from the rest of its arm at the wrist.

Even as the severed hand – and Grandmother – fell toward the ground, Hiral vanished. The line of monsters between him and the Ex-General went next – erupting like something had Pierced right through them. Then the Ex-General vanished too, only a WHUMPand a shockwave left in its place.

Air howled past Hiral’s ears until he stopped nearly a thousand feet away from where the Ex-General had been. And a thousand feet up. His hand clenched the Chimera’s throat hard enough the white flesh was already bruising, while its body snapped in the opposite direction from the sudden halt of momentum. Not that the stop did any real damage to the Wild-Boss, and its three claws – along with its stump – swept up to catch him from all sides.

Moving so fast they whistled through the air, the claws carved around to cut him to ribbons, only to get stopped cold by eight spectral hands, courtesy of Hundred Handed+. The limbs sprouted from Hiral’s back as he held them in the sky, power pouring off him and making the air around them practically vibrate. The Edicts – all of the ones he could see – orbited nearby, their own might thrumming in time with his own.

He wouldn’t be able to control their power for long like this, but here, now – in this moment – they were one.

And they were angry.

“You went after the wrong people,” Hiral said, then opened the hand holding the Ex-General’s throat. A tiny burst of Rejection pushed it away from him, before Hiral’s other hand came up, over, and down with a cocktail of runic power trailing it. Mainly Impact, Expansion, Increase, Breaking, and Dreaming, the runic hammer smashed the Chimera from above like the fist of an angry Progenitor. Driven like a nail straight down, the Ex-General met the ground a thousand feet below in a craterous collision that ripped the earth away from the impact zone. A wave of broken stone, shattered trees, and the mangled parts of hidden monsters soared through the air.

Hiral arrived a second later, driving his fist into the center of the Chimera’s chest, and creating a second wave of debris before the first even settled. Bones crumpled under the weight of his fist, collapsing the Ex-General’s ribcage, but the thing wasn’t a Wild-Boss for nothing.

Up like lightning, the claws on its right side struck at Hiral.

They missed; Hiral stepping to the side like he knew they were coming. Then, before they could even complete their arc, Hiral’s hand snapped out to catch the extended wrist. A turn of his ankle; a twist of his waist; a pull, and the Chimera was soaring back into the air a second time to join the debris from its earlier impact.

Debris Hiral could use.

Strands of Rejection and Attraction snapped out like a spider’s web – hundreds of them – to Connect with the still-falling wreckage. An addition of Gravity and Decrease suddenly stopped it to leave it hanging in the air. For two-hundred feet in every direction, the destruction literally hung on Hiral’s will. Until he gave it a target.

Another flex of his power aimed every broken stone, tree, and body part at the Ex-General hurtling away from him. Then, with a sweep of his arms forward, he shot it all at the focus of his rage.

On their own – even with their numbers – there wasn’t much the rubble would do to the powerful body of the Wild-Boss. Which was exactly why Hiral added a healthy dose of Impact to all of them.

The first piece struck the Chimera with a crack like a boulder splitting. The sound didn’t have a chance to fade before the second struck it. Then the third. Fourth. Fifth. Tenth. Twentieth. So on and so on, Hiral battered the Chimera with a nearly endless stream of Impact-infused projectiles, even as the constant assault knocked its body around through the air.

When natural gravity finally seemed to think it should get involved – and pulled the Chimera towards the ground – Hiral happily helped it along. Gathering up all that remained of the broken wreckage, he slammed it together into little more than a giant ball, then began layering in his runes. All the usual suspects made an appearance, along with an unhealthy amount of Gravity and Compression.

Squeezing his hands in front of himself, Hiral condensed the miscellaneous ball of stuff from nearly one-hundred-feet wide, down to fifty. Then he crashed the man-made meteor into the falling Chimera.

The Ex-General’s body flattened against the surface of the sphere from the force of the impact, the wind howling around it before it struck the earth. Yet another new crater was born into the Cradleof Tomorrow, the resulting shockwave utterly removing one of the zones from the map.

No notification. No rush of energy signalling the Ex-General had died.

Good. Hiral wasn’t finished yet.

Vanishing from where he’d been standing in the air, he appeared floating near the middle of the meteor he’d created. The structure lay cracked – but not completely broken – from its fall, but a swipe of Hiral’s hand finished the job. Separation lived up to its name, blowing the entire sphere aside in a shower of cubes no bigger than a thumbnail.

There, in the center of the newest crater, the Ex-General was hauling itself to its feet, its Chimerichealing factor on full display. The thing hadn’t shown any abilities beyond incredible durability so far. Then again, to be fair, Hiral hadn’t given it a chance to.

No reason to start now.

Reaching his hand up, Hiral’s fingers stretched for the Greatsword of Amin Thett. Except, they paused before he took the hilt. What had Li’l Ur called the Regalia of Amin Thett? A training tool. The Ring – or Crown – of Amin Thett and Second-Skin had been clues that’d helped him reach the Edicts. To connect with things outside himself. To control them.

What then was the point of the Greatsword of Amin Thett? What was it meant to teach him? If the Crown and Second-Skin were the first steps – connecting to and controlling – the Edicts, then the sword had to be only one thing.

How to truly weaponize them.

Hiral’s hand moved away from the Greatsword, but he pictured it in his mind. He’d studied it intimately since he’d gotten it, so it wasn’t difficult to form its image. And the runes on its blade were where he would start.

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Gravity. Expansion. Increase. Energy. And his own, Separation.

Those were the Edicts he called to him.

On his Second-Skin, those same runes ran like black ink atop white water, across his chest, down his arm, and into the palm of his hand. There, the power swirled at the same time the Edicts arrived to circle his forearm. They were the raw laws of the universe. Untempered. Uncontrolled. Untamed.

Except, Hiral would forge them into his weapon.

Through his will, he pulled the four orbiting Edicts together, focusing entirely on his intent. All across his body, those tiny veins of black bleeding out of the runes bulged. Connected. Drew something new across his body as a shadow passed overhead. More of the same energy stretched from his eyes up to his Rune of Dreaming, and down to his Rune of Connection. The same Edicts flared in acquiescence, and the Cradle darkened.

Under his newly-birthed Rune of Eclipse, Hiral would make everything within his sight bend to his dreams. To his will.

At the same time, high above, a new Edictsizzled into existence, carving itself across the sky and reality as the valley shuddered. The Edict of Eclipse to go along with Hiral’s rune. A power to temporarily subvert all others, and that even included the other Edicts.

Hiral squeezed, and the four Edicts unwrote themselves, then swirled together in the palm of his hand. There, they twisted and writhed, then grew to a blade of utter darkness and power. Four-feet long and tearing at reality around it, it looked nothing like the Greatsword of Amin Thett. Black where the other blade glowed like pure sunlight, this thing was too raw. Too dangerous.

It was power without restraint. Consequence without caring. Destruction without control.

And, as Hiral looked at the Ex-General and remembered the image of his hurt sisters – that was exactly what he was going to do to his enemy.

With a thought, Hiral once against vanished from where he’d been hovering to appear directly in front of the Chimera, blade already swinging down. Time slowed around him as the blade carved through the air, shredding reality as it moved, and he locked his gaze on the mouth-eyes of the Chimera.

If it realized its doom was inches away from its skull, it didn’t show an ounce of fear. The opposite, in fact, with defiance radiating out from it like a volcano. It believed itself the ultimate creation. The true master of the Cradle it deserved to rule. And the one who decided what happened to everything else within the valley.

Life or death were its to determine.

It was well and truly wrong.

Hiral’s Edict-Blade cleaved through it from top to bottom without a hint of resistance, leaving a black line bisecting it down the middle. In that heartbeat, it almost looked like nothing more would happen. Like the Chimera’s power would trump Hiral’s.

It was wrong about that too.

The truly terrible part about Hiral’s blade wasn’t its ability to cut just about anything. No, it was the fury of natural laws coming undone that followed in the wake of the strike.

In the next heartbeat after Hiral’s sword cut the Chimera, the unraveling of everything that made it up came next, like a flame birthed in the same black of Hiral’s runes on his Second-Skin. It combusted the arc of Hiral’s swing, along the edges of the wound through the Ex-General, and then in a line beyond. A line that only grew as it continued, the black, churning nothingness touching the sky and reaching the edge of the valley itself.

With the third heartbeat, it all disappeared, leaving a canyon carved through the ground, and only stopping at the boundary of the Cradle of Tomorrow. Within that canyon, the earth had been swept clean, cut so perfectly, it was as if nothing had ever been there before. Even the air above the line still rippled and seethed, like small whirlpools churned.

As for the Ex-General? The flames of nothing consumed it to the very last ember in that short time, obliterating it completely.

A notification blinked in the corner of Hiral’s vision at the same time the blade in his hand – he couldn’t even really call it a sword – singed his fingers. It wasn’t a power he could command for long, and he released the Edicts and the Eclipse above him. Across his body, the new lines connecting his runes shrank back down to their barely-visible state, and he took a deep breath.

The power he’d called on – that he commanded – wouldn’t last much longer. A minute or two at most. Before that happened, he needed to make sure the camp was safe.

Turning back the way he’d come, Hiral Rejected himself back into the air, then streaked across the sky to return to the fortress. There, he stopped to hover above, Second-Skin of Amin Thett snapping in the wind. Below him, everything was still.

The great tree of Grandmother’s power looked positively ragged. The once gold and green leaves had turned an auburn-red, and the whole thing wilted like a great weight pulled on the branches. But it still stood. It still protected the people within its shadow.

As for the attacking force?

It lay shattered around two forms of glowing white – Right and Left.

Not a single Chimeric attacker moved. Or was left in one piece.

The field around Right was filled with broken monsters, layer after layer of them. Some even looked like they’d tried to escape after realizing the futility of fighting the man. They hadn’t made it far.

Left stood sentinel in front of Grandmother and the other injured, his Herald offering protection, while the Waters of Frey eased the pain of the wounded. While he had less corpses in front of him, it wasn’t by much.

They’d done it, and Hiral let a breath of relief exit his chest.

There was only one thing left to do in the time he had before his buffs faded. Hiral floated down to where his sisters sat beside their father. The man had woken up, though he looked like he’d taken a nasty bump on the head.

Left and Right were beside him in an instant, and he looked to them first.

“Good job you two,” Hiral said. “Any problems?”

“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Right said.

“Everything is taken care of here,” Left said. “We got a notification the wave was successfully completed. It’s over.”

“Which means you took care of the general?” Right asked.

“Ex-General,” Hiral corrected. “But, yeah. It’s dead.”

“Was it strong?” Right said.

“Honestly, no idea,” Hiral said. “Didn’t give it a chance to fight back.”

“Rule six, huh?”

“Rule six,” Hiral agreed. “Now…” he turned to his sisters and father. “How are you three doing?”

He got his answer with his sisters charging in to grab him in a tight hug.

“I’ve got you,” he said softly, putting a hand on each of their heads. “Dad, you good?”

“More embarrassed than anything,” Elezad said. “Got a whack to the head right as everything started. By the time I woke up, Left and Right were… well… they were doing something I’m not ever going to forget. I had no idea they were that strong.”

“Me neither,” Grandmother said, limping over. Her cane was no where to be seen, and she was instead using a broken spear to support herself. “Were you holding back this whole time?”

“Nothing like that,” Hiral said. “Just used some powerful buffs.” As he said the words, he felt those selfsame buffs starting to fray around the edges. “Speaking of which,” he said, pushing the girls back so he could look at their faces. “Those buffs are going to fade, but I don’t want you to panic.”

“Panic?” Nat asked. “Why would we panic?”

“Because what I did to get that strong that fast, well, there’s going to be a backlash. I don’t imagine it going to be pretty.”

“How bad?” Elezad asked, worry creeping into his voice.

“Nothing I can’t handle. I promise. I will be fine, even if it may not seem like it immediately.”

“Should we call a healer?” Grandmother asked.

Hiral looked at the broken field around them. “I think most of them are needed elsewhere,” he said. “Besides, we’ve got one right here.” He smiled down at Milly.

“Me?!” Milly asked. “I’m only D-Rank! What am I going to do?”

“I don’t think higher-Rank will make a difference,” Hiral said. “Your knowledge, though? What you’ve learned with the Fool tattoo? That, I think, is what I’ll need. You’ve got my back, right?”

“I… this… you’re…” Milly started and stopped, until Hiral put his hand on her head again and made her look him in the eyes.

“I trust you, okay?” he said as he felt the buffs petering out. “You’ve got this.”

A dozen emotions passed over Milly’s face in that second, but stabilized in the next one. She had control. “I’ve got this,” she told him.

“Good, cause I think that’s the last thing I’m going to…”

Hiral didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence as the buffs faded, and the wall between B-Rank and A-Rank came crashing back down. The shock it sent through his system jolted a spasm through his body, cancelling Foundational Split in a blink, and completely locking up his body.

Vaguely, he saw his father dash forward as arms caught his limp body. Then, a darkness like the blade he’d unleashed closed in on him from all sides, and he didn’t feel anything at all.