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Chapter 91 - Frost Rune
🕑 Added 2024-07-26 20:00:21 +0000 UTCDeep Inhale.
Hold
Long Exhale.
The air up here just smelled better. It didn't carry the stickiness of humidity or earthy smells of the jungle. It was a hint of pine and a slight undertone of forest.
Well, it would be until I finished my preparation. Then it would be something else. Hopefully.
Getting away from the camp was surprisingly easy. As soon as I went to Abigail and my Dad, who were together for some reason, they didn't fight.
Initially, when I found them together, I thought I was in for a slog of an argument but none of that happened.
They almost seemed to expect it. All Abigail did was make sure I had everything planned and made sure I didn't forget everything. All my Dad said was to be careful and that sometimes retreating was the honorable choice.
It was weird.
The whole trip back I thought they were planning something. Like they were going to pop out and say psych before laying into me about how stupid a decision this was.
I didn't know how to feel about them not putting up a fight. I should be happy that they weren't babying me, but the lack of pushback had a certain feeling of its own.
Well, I couldn't dwell on that for too long. I had shit to do.
The conversation with the two didn't last long and I made it back to camp late into the night. There were only a few things that we had to go over. Handing the baton to Abigail in terms of negotiation took longer than originally anticipated, but I still got out of there pretty quickly. I had handled the negotiation between our two camps so far but now that I wouldn't be there, Abigail would be in charge of that.
She was always going to be in charge of that, it just came quicker and more abrupt than a smooth hand over. The negotiation with Tracy wasn't that difficult all things considered. She stated what the rules in her camp were and they were about what I expected. She took all of the points people gathered from hunting and the waves, confiscating them to use on the camp as a whole instead of the individual.
There were a few more odd rules but I made it clear we would not be following that. Giving up all of our points was out of the question. I settled to keep the same ration as before and promised her half. That way, my family could feel like nothing changed, other than the scenery.
She tried to fight me on it, and push back but I shut that down quickly. I was under the assumption that we were helping each other, relinquishing all of our points was not what partners did. Honestly, she was lucky to get half. If that wasn't the standard we already had in place, I would have negotiated for less.
Sigh. That was all Abigail's problem now though. She would have to handle all of that and I got to wash my hands of it.
I would still check in to make sure everything was fine, but I wouldn't be in charge of it any more. It gave me time to focus on other things.
Getting back as late as I did, sleep was first up on the to do list. A quick few hours of z's later, and now it was time to prepare.
I had just over 30 hours to get ready for the hardest wave yet. I couldn't keep the feeling of giddiness from rising. I was excited.
The first thing I had to do was destroy all the buildings. All the lodges and workstations would only get in the way and I didn't want that. I couldn't stand in a gateway like I had previously, I would be fighting inside the walls.
The four gates should stem the tide a little bit and the fight would take place after they got through. I would leave them open as well, closing them would just make me have to repair them needlessly after the wave broke them.
The buildings would help corral the beasts further but they would also get in the way of my fighting. I usually sent ice spinning around me and buildings would get in the way of that.
Destroying them was quite fun. I didn't have to use my hammer but I certainly did. It was a bit sad to tear down all that we had built but that didn't stop the smile on my face while I did it. Tearing things down was a lot more fun than building them.
After flattening out the area except for the keep, I couldn't destroy that, the next step was ready.
When I arrived the previous night, I flared [Permafrost(Un)] until my mana ran dry to prepare. Some of the effects of the skill melted overnight but most had stayed and frozen chunks of ice lingered around the camp.
I wanted to turn it into a land of ice and snow permanently and I had just the way to do it.
After the Blaze Lions, I came up with a way to fix the weakness of my environment. It was a lot harder to turn an existing tundra against me than it was neutral ground.
The way I went about turning the area into a tundra was twofold. The first was using [Permafrost(Un)] whenever my mana allowed. The second was a bit different and took a more delicate touch.
Runes were powerful things, expensive things as well, and I came up with a way to use them more effectively. They weren't restrained to only be used on weapons and equipment like I had been using them.
They were woven into the walls and the keep in a grand tapestry. They could do far more than how I used them.
What would take most of the 30 hours of prep time I had was on this project. I wanted to weave a Rune into the very earth itself.
If I put a Frost Rune under the ground I fought on then it should aid me in turning the area into the land I desired. Buying the Rune was another hit to the wallet but if it worked, it would be well worth it.
The first thing I had to do was adjust the size. Every rune I had engraved thus far was the size of my hand or slightly larger, not the size of a football field.
I had to make sure the proportions stayed the same and that it was scaled appropriately. Too far away from the original shape made it a different Rune entirely.
[Basic Runecrafting(Un)] helped tremendously with this task.
After upgrading my profession and gaining the skill, all runecraft was a smidge easier. The skill helped me know when the Rune deviated too far from its original shape.
There were a few kinks I had to work out through the process but I believed it would work. The first was how I was going to actually make the rune.
Engraving took material away from the source in the shape of the Rune and was one of the weakest ways to create a rune.
Pulling strength from what was removed rather than added was a weaker way of going about it but was both easier and cheaper. It was the reason low-level Runes were engraved rather than inlaid.
The low power of the Rune wasn't worth using precious material to inlay it.
That became a problem when I started carving lines into the ground. Fighting was messy and chaotic. There was no way the lines would survive the fight without getting messed up, whether from blood contaminating it or from feet and claws smudging it.
Since carving the Rune was out, the subtractive method, inlaying the Rune was the only thing left, the additive method.
That opened a whole new can of worms. Like what would I make the rune out of?
From information I'd bought and gathered from the store before and more recently, different alloys of metal were common for use in equipment, but what I was attempting to do was different.
What I was making was closer to a ward than an enchantment on equipment. While both were made of Runes, they functioned differently.
Wards were common for stationary defenses and the like while enchantments were smaller and designed to go on swords and other gear.
The difference in size and utility prompted two different styles of creation. There were more uses for Runes than those two, and it wasn't limited to just the two techniques total, but those were the two I was worried about right now.
Wards were usually anchored to the area they were made and that was where they drew strength from. What they were made of was a big part of how strong they were and what effects they had.
A ward could use countless materials, from metal and stone all the way to crystal and blood. What the Rune was made of altered what it did. It wouldn't alter a Rune completely, but the medium through which the Rune was expressed colored the meaning slightly.
It was like drinking water through a filter made of orange peels. It was still water but with a hint of orange in it.
I browsed the store for different things I could make it out of and constantly winced at the prices. It wasn't even the cost of material that was bad, it was the amount I needed.
Our camp was huge and to fill the entire area with the Rune would take a lot of material. As I planned, thoughts of how to go about it shuffled around. My plan was to make one giant Rune covering the entire area inside the walls. It was probably the least efficient way to do it, and any experienced Runesmith would probably weep at my amateur design, but it was the best I could do.
It was better to make one giant Rune and hope it worked, than to guess at chaining them together in an order that worked. I didn't have the time to learn how to do it any differently.
I almost bit the bullet and bought one of the crystal options before I stopped myself.
I was being stupid. Why should I buy crystal when I could make crystal.
Ice wasn't technically the type of crystal wards were meant to use but why wouldn't it work? It was free to me and I could shape it however I desired.
It didn't hurt to try and it would only waste time to attempt, so I did it. I wanted to finish before the wave came and if this failed, I wouldn't have time to try again but I felt it was worth the attempt.
I had already marked out on the ground the lines and curves of the Rune, now all I had to do was make it.
Ice was fragile and prone to breaking if we fought on top of it and would lead to the same problem that carving did so I added an extra step.
[Permafrost(Un)] did what its name entailed and froze the top layer of the earth, creating a layer of permafrost.
If I buried the ice deep enough it wouldn't be disturbed from the fighting. I wasn't sure how it would affect the power of the Rune by being buried but it shouldn't affect it too much.
The hardest part of the whole process was that I couldn't physically see what I was doing. I used [Permafrost(Un)] to create ice underneath the ground before using [Ice Manipulation(C)] to mold it into the right shape.
Since I couldn't see it, I had to rely on [Ice Manipulation(C)] entirely to feel out where the ice was and if it was the right shape.
My range wasn't big enough to fit the whole Rune which added an extra layer of difficulty. I couldn't see the entire Rune at once and was only ever dealing with sections of it.
The process took hours. It was painstaking difficult and by the end, my mind was on fire. Using [Ice Manipulation(C)] for that long was hard and stressed my mind's capabilities.
It was the repetitiveness of creating the ice, shaping the ice, going over it again to smooth it out, and then putting the finishing touches on for uniform thickness and width.
I would do all that for one line at a time before moving on to the next section. After the rough shape of the Rune was down, I had to go back and even everything out.
Sure, I tried to make everything uniform when I first made it, but when I was only looking at a few feet at a time little deviations added up that were easy to miss.
The curves especially. I tried to make the curves uniform but it was easy to lose the forest for the trees. I would think that it was fine before stepping back to realize it wasn't.
After the hours of freezing everything into roughly the right shape, it took hours more tweaking and shaving down to make it perfect. Well, as close to perfect as I could get.
After getting everything right, nothing happened.
I expected it to like... flash into being.
After nothing happened, I went back to correct any mistakes. For a fourth time.
Again, nothing happened.
For the fifth, sixth, seventh, all the way to over ten tries and nothing happened.
I was ready to rip it out of the ground by the dozenth time. Going back over it anymore wouldn't lead to anything productive.
It was at this point I had an epiphany. Runes didn't require a power source on equipment because of their size and ability to draw it from the material it was engraved on.
Wards, on the other hand, needed a power source. Whether it be the surroundings or a mana battery of some kind, a power source was required.
The size of the Rune and the effect I wanted was too strong for the ambient mana the Rune was capturing.
After noticing my fuck up, some screams of frustration sounded out in the camp. Maybe a few curses too. Whose to say?
I didn't have the know-how or the Rune schematic for making a siphoning or gathering Rune of some kind to gather mana from the area so that left option two. A power source.
This being the first time I had done this, I had no clue what was needed. I assumed using a mana stone would work but how large of one was required?
They got increasingly expensive as their size went up.
Getting an Ice mana stone directly sounded better but it cost more as well.
I was sick of going back and buying information from the store and was, frankly, fed up with the whole process. So I did something else.
It would either work or it wouldn't. It was already dark by now and the entire day had gone by with me tinkering with it. My head was on fire from using [Ice Manipulation(C)] so much and my frustration with the stupid Rune was at a peak.
At certain times in life saying 'Fuck it' was necessary.
This was one of those times.
I bought the largest Ice Affinity mana stone I was willing to spend points on without a second thought. It took some redneck engineering to tie the two together but I worked it out.
I couldn't just shove the mana stone into the ground and hope for the best.
I went to the center of the Rune and dug down into the earth, deep under the Rune. I didn't want the stone anywhere anywhere near the surface. Calling it a stone was a misnomer.
Mana stones were made of crystal, not stone. Why they had that name was a mystery and one I didn't care about right now.
I placed the stone under the center of the Rune before adding a tendril of Ice to connect the two. There was most likely some way to connect the two without a physical connection but I didn't know how.
As soon as the two were connected, mana shot down the Ice of the Rune and spiraled out into the curves and structure all over the camp. I could feel the ice mana with [Ice Manipulation(C)] as it spread through the camp.
It flowed down the lines of the Rune saturating the ice it was made of.
As the last of the ice was filled with mana, frost began to coalesce in the air.
The ground froze over and the bits of frost left over from [Permafrost(Un)] expanded out.
I watched in real-time as the environment changed. Ice coated the ground and snowflakes started forming in the air.
The temperature plummeted by the minute and it showed no signs of stopping.
This was what I wanted. I couldn't help but break out into manic laughter. All the hours slaving away creating it was worth it. It was exactly what I wanted.
It changed the very mana into the air into Ice mana. Every other kind either fled the area or was converted.
After a few minutes, the only thing left was Ice and Frost mana.
It was wonderful.
After the Rune completed, notification chimes sounded out but I was too busy watching the fruit of my labor to check. Now that I looked them over I couldn't help but start another round of laughter.
Congratulations! You have leveled up.
Congratulations! You have leveled up.
Congratulations! You have leveled up.
Skills Available
You have upgraded a skill:
Ice Manipulation(Common) -> Ice Manipulation(Uncommon)
Mana Engraving(Common) -> Mana Engraving(Uncommon)
Three profession levels pushing me to level 35 and a new skill as well as an upgrade for one of my most fundamental skills.
Oh, I was ready now.
Comments
Demonlord
Thanks for the amazing chapter ๐ Creating the massive ice rune is a tremendous boost for him ๐ the fights next week will be awesome
PenguinKills
You're right that was supposed to be level 35, not 30.
Kris Boxall
Thanks for the chapter! I thought Chris got Rhythm Forging at 30?
