Chapter 121: [Excise]

Not a single one of them was alive since no green dots appeared or red, not that Kael was thinking of releasing any if they were.

Even if one of them had been alive, Kael wasn’t running a charity. He wasn’t here to rescue strangers who would either slow him down or stab him when they realized he had loot.

He was here to get what the blue dot promised and get out before the red dots remembered hunger.

It didn’t take them long to reach the top of the building, still similar to the rest, it was nothing but beams, spider webs, and where walls used to be.

Up here, the building stopped pretending to be a building. It was skeletal. Beams jutted out like ribs, and the walls were more memory than structure. Wind cut straight through the open gaps, screaming faintly as it passed broken boards. Webs stretched between beams like pale scars, vibrating when the gusts hit them.

A powerful gust of wind shook the entire building, threatening to make it collapse. But that wasn’t reason enough for Kael to hesitate. He was on the floor where the rune was.

He planted his boots wider, letting the vibration travel through his legs, and waited for the shaking to settle. If the place came down, it came down. Hesitation didn’t stop gravity. Hesitation just made you die tired.

Turning his head toward its location, he finally found it.

A small pentagonal rune on the ground was far too close to the ledge where the wind was blowing hard.

It sat there like a joke someone with a cruel sense of humor had left behind. A neat little shape on cracked stone, right at the edge of open air. One wrong step and you didn’t get a second chance. The wind at the ledge wasn’t gentle either.

It grabbed at clothes, pushed at the balance, tried to shove them off like the Tower wanted to see who would fall.

“That’s it? I thought you found something legendary,” Peter said when he noticed the rune on the ground.

Kael didn’t look away from it as he answered. His eyes stayed fixed on the pentagon, measuring distance, measuring footing, checking how much the floor flexed under his weight. “You expect a legendary item to be here on the first floor?” Kael said mockingly.

Although in reality, he did have two legendary items on the first floor that no one else knew about, his hammer and the Anchor rune. That was the part that made the mockery taste better. Peter was talking like the Tower was generous. Kael had already learned the Tower wasn’t generous. It just hid rewards behind the kind of pain most people didn’t survive.

“You’re right, it’s not possible to see that.”

Kael stepped closer, boots scraping silk strands off the stone. “Also, it doesn’t need to be legendary,” Kael said as he approached the rune on the floor.

“How come?” Peter asked.

Kael lifted his arm slightly and turned his wrist so the gauntlet caught what little light there was. The metal still looked wrong on him, too heavy, too eager, like it had been made for someone else’s life. He showed him his gauntlet, “This is all just rune magic.”

Peter snorted, but not in a way that felt confident. More like he was repeating something he’d heard a thousand times and needed to keep believing. “Rune magic is trash man.”

“Can you say that again after what you saw?” Kael said.

Peter hesitated, eyes flicking toward the top floor behind them like he expected a spider to be listening. “I would be hard pressed to say yes, but no. It isn’t that rune magic that’s strong, it’s you that is weird.”

Kael’s mouth twitched. “That’s rude,” Kael said as he grabbed the rune.

He didn’t pick it up like a normal item. He touched it with care, like you touched a blade you didn’t know yet, thumb and forefinger closing around the piece while the rest of his hand stayed ready to pull away if the thing bit back. His skin prickled faintly when the rune came into contact, like the world was acknowledging the transaction.

“No, I’m being serious, think about it, who else could do what you did? Like that gauntlet, no one would dare even touch it. It offers power, sure, but in the long run… what you used to kill those spiders, a mage with enough intelligence stat could do with his eyes closed.”

Kael’s gaze stayed on the rune in his hand, but he was listening. He always listened. Even when people were wrong, they were wrong in ways that revealed what everyone believed, and knowing what everyone believed was a weapon. “How much INT does a mage need to do something like that?” Kael asked.

“About 60 to 70. Give or take, why?”

“So if I’m comparable to a mage with 60 poitns in INT, doesn’t that make it broken already?” Kael asked.

Peter shook his head, and his expression went into that patient look people used when they thought they were explaining something obvious to someone stubborn.

“No,” Peter shook his head, “Because a mage can use far more magic than just a fireball with 60 in INT. you on the other hand, would need different runes to do different effects, and that’s already a pain in the ass since no one even collects that trash. And yes, you might be strong now, but to find a rune that can do even more damage than what you do, and even have the requirement to use it, that’s a different story.”

To anyone else in the tower, what Peter said was right. The Tower’s economy treated runes like junk because most people couldn’t afford the time, the cost, or the brain damage of trying to understand them. Runes were weak; they required a lot of resources to use. They also need understanding and cost multiple times the effort and price to even conjure. To everyone else, that statement was true.

But to Kael, it was complete bullshit. Not because Peter’s logic was wrong in a normal world, but because Kael wasn’t playing by normal rules anymore. He wasn’t going to tell Peter he was wrong.

After all, no one would believe that he didn’t even have nearly half of 60 points in INT, nor was he even using optimal material to channel the runes. It was nothing but normal steel and the dust of a few scales that are channeling these powerful small apparats. If he said that out loud, Peter would either call him a liar or start asking questions he could not be allowed to ask.

“Maybe,” Kael said, “But it’s saving our asses now.”

“That is right. Peter said as he looked down toward the staircase, “Now, how are we going to leave?”

Kael turned his head slightly, letting his eyes track the broken stairwell behind them. The spiders had backed off, but that didn’t mean the route was safe. It meant it was temporarily not worth it to them. Those were two different things, and Kael didn’t like relying on monsters making rational decisions for long.

“I have an idea of how to, but give me a second,” Kael held the pentagonal Rune and inspected it.

The moment he focused, the familiar pull of the system responded, the rune’s information snapping into clarity like a label appearing on a bottle.

[Excise]

Type: Basic Rune

Rarity: Rare.

Effect:

Lowers Mana Cost

Reduces Effect Scale.

Reduces Intensity.

Narrows effects.

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