Into Twilight: Chapter 36

The next six months of Dan’s time with Daeson passed with a frustrating regularity. He continued his normal routine, but with the addition of runescripting practice. Once or twice a week, Daeson would demonstrate a new rune for Dan, which he would usually learn immediately with the help of the System.

Actually drawing the runes, on the other hand, was a bit more of an issue. Even with a perfect memory of Daeson’s work, it was still incredibly difficult for Dan to exactly replicate the order and width of the pen strokes needed to craft each rune. Between rune demonstrations, Dan would practice his craftsmanship on scraps of silver.

Daeson informed Dan that these scraps of silver were known as spellshards, runescripted enchantments embedded in surfaces too weak to contain the power of the effect they generated. After one use, the runescript would overheat and melt off the surface it was embedded on. Although permanent enchantments could be inscribed in silver, the amount of mana that an enchantment could carry was directly related to the rarity and cost of the materials used in inscribing it. Copper would self-destruct after the simplest of cantrips was cast through it. Silver could bear minor permanent enchantments or more serious spellshards. Gold and mythril could both handle almost the same power of enchantment, but clearly mythril was much more suited to combat.

Apparently, low level magi often used spellshards or something like them to empower their spell arsenals, given how much time and effort went into actually learning and memorizing a spell. A spellshard might only be used once, but it could let a magi create any effect that they had the right affinity for. As Dan learned during another wine-fueled lesson from Daeson, spellshards were also the reason why the class system used by the rest of humans on Twilight was so limiting. Ultimately, classes taught humans to rely on skills that were runescripted into them. The minute they tried to run too much mana through a skill, it would melt like a spellshard, almost-certainly killing the caster.

Now, this wouldn’t be as big of a concern if the classes were well-crafted, but most of them were “hack jobs at best” per Daeson’s drunken mutterings. Runescripting on a human body could either be a custom job or mass produced. A custom set of runescripting embedded in a person’s body would generally grow with them, using the body’s natural mana conductivity to supplement the ink. The downside was that it took a tremendous amount of time and skill to make a custom set.

The crafter needed constant feedback from the person that they were inscribing the runescript on, either verbally or through a spell monitoring their body. The process had a tendency to overtax the system of its recipients, and without constant medical care, it was easy to accidentally murder the person you were supposed to be enchanting.

Given the time and pain involved, most who could afford the spells were put into a magical stasis and monitored by servants. Even those fanatical about self-perfection and training weren’t exactly keen to spend months to years of agony slowly adapting to the enchantments.

Even worse, usually, the runes needed to be adjusted after the recipient ranked up the first and second time, to ensure that they were growing properly with the user. The average custom inscription took almost two years to inscribe and fine tune enough where the user could rely upon it. Mass-produced rune inscriptions like armor and classes had an upper limit defined by the quality of the materials used and the skill of the crafter.

“Wait!” Dan cut Daeson short as the elf lectured him while sipping from a bottle of wine. “Are you telling me that every adventurer on Twilight functionally has a time bomb inscribed onto their skin?”

“More or less.” Daeson shrugged, glancing at the inscription Dan had made for a force amplification rune. “The powers that be wanted to make humans strong enough to fight the Orakh in short order, but they also didn’t want them petitioning for full citizenship in the Empire. The Empire generally recruits anyone who is of high enough rank to actually risk overloading their classes, and when it happens, it usually only happens on the front line. The human soldiers and marines have some idea of what is going on, but the Empire hushes it up, so they really don’t have anything more than rumors.”

“That’s horrible, though!” Dan frowned, setting the scrap of silver down in front of him. “All those people fighting and scraping to make something of themselves, and the only light at the end of the tunnel is their own self-immolation.”

“It is terribly inefficient,” Daeson agreed. “The Empire really needs to take the long view. Classes make humans powerful quickly, but this isn’t a war that will be over in a decade. Already, we have been fighting the Orakh for almost four hundred years. Cannon fodder has its place, and I’m sure most human warriors won’t amount to much more than that, but an allowance needs to be made for the truly talented. Take you, for example, Mr. Thrush. You’re truly a credit to your race. None of the usual bestial instincts and lack of cleanliness that I’ve come to expect from humans. I see no reason why you shouldn’t be allowed to join the Empire as a probationary citizen.”

“Isn’t there some way that you could let the humans know what they’re signing up for when they take a class?” Dan asked the elf. “I’m sure plenty would still take a limited path to power like a class, but it just doesn’t seem right to keep them completely uninformed.”

“Of course, you would be a bleeding heart.” Daeson huffed before taking another pull of wine. “What do you want us to do next? Let them know how bad the war is going? That despite us sacrificing entire worlds’ worth of humans, the Orakh are still coming? No, there’s a reason why more experienced heads are in charge of these things. You’d just cause a panic. The tributary worlds would just focus on their own survival and stop contributing to the Empire. Their eventual sacrifice would be meaningless.”

Dan paused, fuzzy memories of his master’s degree in electrical engineering bubbling to the surface. While runescripting wasn’t exactly the same as the logic gates he’d studied early in his program, it was similar enough. He chewed on his lip briefly, wracking his brain for a solution to the crude class design.

“Couldn’t there at least be some work done into stabilizing the classes?” Dan asked plaintively. “Put a hard cap into how much power someone could channel through the class to prevent them from overloading it. That way you can keep the class system without it being a death sentence. It’s as simple as putting a fuse into each skill.”

“What’s a fuse?” Daeson questioned fuzzily.

“A portion of the rune that could safely overload and fizzle without destroying the rest of the rune,” Dan supplied excitedly. “Probably in the stroke after the initial mana aperture stroke, you could use ink of a slightly worse quality and set it up to shunt off excess energy if that portion of the rune failed. Any time someone used too much power, only a small part of the rune would overload. They’d need to get the fuse tattooed on themselves again after blowing it out, but they would survive, and they could continue fighting. It lets us increase human survivability and combat potential at limited extra cost to the Tellask Empire. Everyone wins.”

“Why would I want to make classes safer?” Daeson frowned as he took another pull from the wine bottle. “Classes were Jareth’s infernal invention. If we improve them, that’s tantamount to admitting that Jareth was right.”

“Who cares if Jareth is right!” Dan continued. “You’ll be a hero for helping the Empire and saving lives. You’ll be back at the Academy in no time.”

“Who cares if Jareth is right!?” Suddenly, Daeson was screaming, his wine bottle shattering next to Dan. “Jareth is the one who twisted society against me, just because of his petty jealousies. He didn’t care that I had found the best way to use the Empire’s resources in the oncoming war, no! Instead, he discredited me through libel and rumors! He told everyone that I wanted to teach humans magic because I was too close to them. Do you know what he said?”

Daeson grabbed Dan’s collar and lifted him up with a surprising amount of strength before leaning forward and whispering in his ear. “He said I fornicated with them. That I tarnished my blood by laying with your kind. No! I will not be doing anything that makes Jareth look good. He owes me a debt of honor, and I’m not going to help him salvage his reputation when how poorly the human warriors are doing on the front is revealed. It can be his turn to fall from grace.”

“But what about all of the people that will die?” Dan knew better than to ask the unstable elf, but he couldn’t stop himself. “Surely there is something we can do for them?”

“Can do?” Daeson questioned rhetorically with a snort. “There’s much I can do. Will do? Now, that is another question. This planet has done nothing but serve as a prison for me. If you think I’m going to help its inhabitants out of the goodness of my heart, I am sorry to disappoint you. That said, Daniel… unlike them, you have potential. You could turn this entire paradigm on its head and give your people a route forward.’

Daeson pursed his lips, a brief flash of anger clouding his golden eyes. “Perhaps I’ve been too easy on you. Your questions show that you’ve grown weak and soft. Twice a week, from now on, I will be sending you out into the wastes to bring back meat. As soon as we finish training you in the basics of runecrafting, you will inscript yourself, and you will spend a night outside.”

Dan swallowed any further complaints. Daeson was drinking again, and that meant that Dan shouldn’t push him. The elf was usually erratic, prone to fits of anger and flights of fancy. When he drank, however, Daeson became mean. He frequently drunkenly set dangerous or painful tasks for Dan to accomplish, often with very little purpose. Dan strongly suspected that, when the elf was feeling morose, he simply just wanted to watch Dan suffer. Arguing with him would only lead to more meritless and painful punishments.

The next morning, Dan journeyed out onto the wastes, a sullen and hungover Daeson in tow. Daeson provided no help whatsoever, instead grumbling the entire time about how slow Dan moved as they traversed the mountainside looking for prey. Eventually, they found the beast Dan was looking for, an armadillo-like monster that disguised itself as a boulder and whose blood was useful in gravity-based rune inscriptions. Dan quickly finished it off with a series of long-range Fireballs and Lightning Strokes before the ungainly creature could get close to him. Then, Daeson made Dan carry the beast’s corpse back on his own after making some sort of statement about how “heavy lifting builds character.”

Two months proceeded in this manner, with Dan hunting and killing for food, to accumulate mana, and to practice his spell and runes. Eventually, he gained enough mana to rank up, and for the first time, he experienced how much easier it was to clear his body of ambient mana once he started using the mana channels that Daeson had taught him about. As much as the elf’s increased drinking and worsening sour moods troubled Dan, he really couldn’t question that working with Daeson had been incredibly useful to him.

Finally, shortly after he reached rank 3, Daeson approached him to inform him that it was time for him to runescript himself. Dan took a deep breath and followed the elf to a laboratory designed for such endeavors. He glanced at the tables covered in inscribing pens, whole orders of magnitude more ornate than anything Daeson had let him experiment with. Next to them was a cabinet filled with powdered silver, gold, and mythril as well as a wide assortment of monster blood and extracts.

“This is it, Daniel,” Daeson stated with a level of formality that the mad elf usually couldn’t muster. “Think of this as the most important exam you have ever taken. If you succeed in inscribing yourself and surviving a night, you will have proved me right, and I will be petitioning to make you a citizen of the Empire as part of my campaign to save my legacy. I never thought it would only take you ten months to reach this point, but you are the most talented individual I have ever encountered in my millennia as a professor.”

Daeson shrugged. “Of course, if you fail, I will have wasted almost a year on fruitlessly training you. I will almost certainly murder you if you survive your failed inscription, but you probably won’t survive such a failure, so… no pressure.”

Dan took a second to review his status:

He avoided expanding the list of known runes, content to simply let the plus sign hover next to it in his status. Over the last eight months, he had learned everything in the basic primer given to him by Daeson as well as a good number more. He already knew which runes he planned on chaining together into his personal inscription; it was just a matter of execution.

Dan closed the menu and picked up a pen. He was as ready as he was ever going to be. Now, it was just a matter of putting those hard months of training to the test.