Chapter 118: Novice Runeweaver

A list of materials obtained from the dead carcass soon flooded Kael’s vision, but that wasn’t what was important. The last notification was what grabbed his attention.

It was like the Tower enjoyed spitting loot in his face at the exact worst moment, when his eyes should have been glued to the staircase and the moving red dots, not to a scrolling list of glands and limbs and silk. The words stacked over the world, blocking angles and distances, turning the fight into a cluttered window full of temptation. Kael’s jaw tightened as he forced his focus past it, because a single second of reading the wrong line was the kind of mistake that ended with mandibles in a throat.

Then he saw the last part. The part that did not feel like loot. The part that felt like a rule snapping into place.

[You have discovered the word [Pressing Flames] {ᛚᛁᚷᚦᚱᚪᚳ}.]

[Your understanding of [ᛚᛁᚷᚦᚱᚪᚳ] is still elementary. Mana cost and efficiency have been increased.]

[Your Understanding of Runic Combinations has improved.]

[You have achieved Novice Runeweaver Mastery]

[You have fulfilled the minimum conditions to properly use [Runeweave]]

[Your Mana pool has finalized its transition.]

[You no longer have Mana.]

[You have unlocked Internal Energy].

Kael’s eyes dragged across each line as if his brain refused to accept the words unless it read them twice. The Tower was telling him he had improved, and at the same time, it was telling him it had taken something away. He didn’t know which part made him more uneasy, the promise of “Runeweave” or the blunt finality of “You no longer have Mana.”

The headache that was blasting Kael’s head suddenly disappeared. And in his vision, something like a blue bar appeared. No matter where he looked, it was there, small but there. It wasn’t full. About two-tenths of the way to full.

The relief came so abruptly that it almost made him stumble. One heartbeat, he had a nail driven behind his eyes, the next heartbeat, it was gone, like someone had ripped the pain out by the roots.

The empty space it left behind was its own kind of shock, a clean quiet in his skull that made the world sound sharper. The skittering below, the scraping of metal feet on concrete, even Peter’s breathing behind him, everything felt clearer.

The blue bar was worse than the relief. It hovered at the edge of everything he saw, steady and undeniable, a new measurement that didn’t care if he understood it. Kael flicked his eyes left, right, down the stairwell, toward the open side of the building where sunlight stabbed in, and the bar stayed. It didn’t blink. It didn’t fade. It sat there like a leash.

Two-tenths full. Not enough to feel safe. Enough to feel the possibility.

Looking at the spiders around them, he saw it, for the first time, hesitation. The spiders were finally realizing that this ’prey’ wasn’t going to simply roll on the ground in a fetal position and cry.

They had been moving with that cold group confidence, the kind predators had when they knew a target would break. Now their legs tapped slower. Their bodies shifted back a fraction. It was subtle, the way an animal flinched without retreating, but Kael caught it because he lived on fractions now. The Atrax Stalkers weren’t panicking. They weren’t fleeing. They were recalculating, and that alone was a victory.

The Atrax were now worried and calculating.

This prey was fighting back. And it was hard to kill.

“That’s so fucking awesome!” Peter said, genuinely.

Peter’s voice came out too loud for the setting, bright with that stupid kind of excitement that only showed up when someone survived a moment they expected to die in. His eyes were wide, and the Fire-imbued Axe in his hands looked less like a loan and more like a lifeline he was afraid to drop.

“Stay focused!” Kael berated, it wasn’t the time to be joyful or happy. There were still many more spiders coming their way. But this time, Kael could fight back.

The words snapped out of him like a slap. Kael didn’t have the luxury of celebrating. The celebration made you slow. It made you careless. The spiders below didn’t care about Peter’s feelings, and the spiders above didn’t care about his awe. Kael kept his gauntleted hand half-raised, feeling heat trapped under metal and leather, feeling the runes seated along his arm like loaded mechanisms waiting for a mistake.

“Follow me!” Kael said as he rushed toward the stairs, this time, not down, to escape, but up.

He moved before Peter could argue again, boots biting into the grit on the stairs. Going up felt wrong on instinct. Every sane part of the body wanted down, toward exits, toward air, toward streets. Kael ignored that part. The mini-map had already shown him what down meant. It meant interception. It meant getting boxed in from three directions and dying tired.

“We’re going up?” Peter said, arguing clearly in his tone, but his feet were right behind Kael.

Peter didn’t like it, and Kael didn’t blame him. Up meant deeper. Up meant fewer escape routes. Up meant trusting that Kael’s plan wasn’t just desperation wearing a mask.

“Yes, if we keep them juggling between going down and up, we’ll buy ourselves more time,” Kael said. He knew well that no matter how fast they tried to go down, if all the spiders decided to jump down from the side of the building, they would be surrounded in seconds.

As he spoke, Kael listened to the building itself. The Atrax feet made that metal tapping sound on every surface they touched, and the sound carried through beams and hollow spaces. The moment the stalkers committed to one direction, Kael needed to be moving the other way. He needed them out of rhythm. He needed them guessing.

But going up, where the spiders weren’t expecting, that was a good way to clear ground and also served Kael’s goal.

He needed to get to the top floor.

The rune was still waiting, somewhere above, and Kael felt it like a thorn in his mind. Every step had two purposes. Survive the next ten seconds, and keep climbing. If he let the spiders push him downward long enough, he’d lose both.

Once they reached the stairs, a couple of Spiders were waiting in line.

The sight of it rising made Kael’s mouth tighten. It wasn’t fear exactly, not anymore. It was timing. The stalker lifted, abdomen exposed, legs spread for leverage. It was preparing to drop its weight and crush. That move was made to break skulls and end fights quickly.

This was probably how they hunted, to break their enemies’ skulls with their mandibles to allow for maximum damage using their weight. But this also did something that made them easy to deal with.

It exposed their abdomen for a second.

And that was the second Kael was waiting for.

He didn’t waste it. The new blue bar pulsed at the edge of his vision as he moved, and he felt Internal Energy drain in a way that was different from mana. Mana had been a pull, a siphon that left pain. This was sharper, cleaner, like spending muscle rather than blood. He drove forward with his shoulder behind his fist.

He threw a punch, a fast forward punch, this time he felt his posture was slightly better than before, but instead of aiming only at the spider, he made sure that before his fist connected that he angled it just a tiny bit.

The choice was tiny, but it mattered. He wasn’t just punching to kill. He was punching to shape the aftermath. The staircase was narrow. Their bodies were close. But he had a goal in mind.

It would deal less damage since it isn’t a direct frontal hit but rather slightly curved, but that curve had a purpose.

The gauntlet flared again. Heat rushed through the metal like a breath trapped in a furnace, but the lining held, the containment doing what it was made to do. Kael felt the runes along his arm activate in order, not as words, but as sensations, a stabilizing clamp, a sudden heaviness, then fire that behaved like an object instead of a flame.

The explosion of heat and power immediately broke the spider’s shell. The recoil hammered him through the arm into the collarbone. It wasn’t enough to drop him, but it was enough to remind him that Internal Energy had limits, too. The bar lost another sliver. He couldn’t see numbers, but he didn’t need them. He could feel the cost in the ache building behind the joint.

The cost of that small dip in that blue bar was revealed to him in the form of a heatwave of force and fire that blasted through the first spider, and thanks to that angle he chose for his fist, the shrapnel, fire, and remaining power of his fist shot-gunned into the second spider.

“Now that’s how you farm mobs!”

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