Chapter 35: Chapter 35: Fourth Rune (2)

After I finished my initial experiments with my first rune ability, I went to find my friends. After retrieving them from their houses, we gathered near the ocean, far enough away from the village that we could talk with privacy.

“I can’t believe you’ve already gotten your fourth rune built,” said Felix, giving me a  grin. “Since you’re a full grade behind me in Absorption Essence, I thought you’d take a little longer to finish stabilizing your third. What kind of power did you get?”

I didn’t answer with words - instead, with extreme difficulty, I pulled a small blob of water out of the ocean and floated it above our heads. Then, I converted the blob of water into a ball of light. Slowly, but surely, I began manipulating the illusion until it looked less like a shapeless ball of light, and more like the eye of one of the giant fish. It wasn’t a very good illusion, but it was the best I could do for now.

“Some sort of ability that converts water into illusions?” Felix looked at the ocean thoughtfully. “It looks like you also have some very minor water control, although it’s pretty weak.”

“I can also convert water into healing,” I said. “It heals flesh and blood.” Felix nodded, thoughtfully. “How much water can you move at once?”

“I can barely move a quantity of water equal to the size of my head if I’m trying to go quickly,” I said. “Nowhere near enough water to be useful for a fight, sadly. But the healing and illusions are the primary parts of my ability.”

“Illusions are pretty interesting,” said Sallia. “In my previous world, illusionism was known to be a really tricky school of magic, but proper illusionists could do amazing things on a battlefield if they were competent and had quick wits.” Then, Sallia looked at me and frowned. “Actually, you don’t have particularly quick wits right now. Your Intelligence is a little lacking.”

I winced, before sighing “I’ll make it work. Honestly, I think the healing bit is a lot more useful to me. right now.”

“True,” said Sallia, turning towards the ocean. “You said you wanted to learn more about the ocean when you get older, and explore it if possible, so I guess healing is a decent fit. Also, abilities that heal flesh are pretty rare in the village - it’s much more common to be able to treat bones and blood, since those have more obvious offensive uses as well. Does your ability properly deal with drowning?”

“I haven’t tested it yet. That’s part of why I called you two over - I wanted to run a few experiments. First, I want to see if I can ‘breathe’ underwater by healing myself rapidly with my ability. And second, I wanted to spar - I figure that my control over illusions is really weak right now, but it’s my most combat-oriented component of my first rune ability. For both tests, I wanted you two around to help me out and make sure nothing goes wrong.”

Sallia suddenly looked a little nervous. “How are you planning on testing drowning? You’re not going to…”

I nodded. “I’m going to immerse myself in water, and then try holding my breath as long as possible. Then I’m going to try healing my flesh and blood, to see if I can deal with the effects of not breathing for an extended period of time.”

Sallia breathed a sigh of relief. “I worried you might just jump in the water and try drowning yourself to see what happens. That sounds a lot less dangerous, at least.”

Felix nodded. “If something goes wrong, I know a kind of treatment for it that can help flush the water out of your body and get you breathing again. It’s nothing special, and it might break a few ribs, but it should keep you alive.”

“If something goes wrong, use your technique while Sallia calls for a healer.” I said, before taking a few steps into the ocean. Then, I closed my eyes and sat down. The water of the ocean now covered most of my body, but left my head above water. I took one final deep breath, held my breath and concentrated on my ability.

Then, I started ‘healing’ my blood and flesh. The feeling I got when healing something that wasn’t damaged was… different. Odd. At first, my ability didn’t seem to have anything to target, and so I simply wasted mana.

Water gently lapped around me as I healed nonexistent injuries. Meanwhile, the desperation of not being able to breathe started to grow worse as the seconds ticked by. I started panicking. Was my ability not able to cope with drowning, the way I thought it would?

As my body began to panic, my rune ability finally found a ‘problem’ it could heal. After almost half a minute of holding my breath, my ability was finally picking up my need for oxygen. The feeling of drowning stopped intensifying. I was still miserable - it felt like I was drowning, every single second that I sat here. I was forcing myself not to breathe in purely through the power of my Grade 7 Willpower, but my body was screaming at me every step of the way. However, the feeling of drowning didn’t get any worse. It was nearly unbearable… but I could keep concentrating. 

Five minutes passed. Then ten. In that time, I didn’t take a single breath. After a few minutes, I even managed to open my eyes, and gave my friends a thumbs up. The feeling of healing myself while drowning was awful, but I could clearly do it. I did, however, get the feeling that it would have been impossible with Grade 5 Willpower. It might have just barely been doable with Grade 6, but every second would have been a struggle. Thankfully, I had endured the storms for several years now, and with grade 7 willpower it wasn’t too hard to hold my breath, heal myself, and still look around. After ten minutes, I stood back up, since my test was concluded, before I started to suck in lungfuls of air.

“Looks like it works?” said Sallia, grinning.

After I finished taking in lungfuls of sweet, sweet air and trying to erase the feeling of asphyxiation from my memory, I nodded. “I think I can stay underwater as long as I have mana. The mana consumption is awful though - I doubt I can last more than fifteen minutes at most. After that, I’ll be out of mana.”

“At least it works!” Said Felix, grinning. However, Salliafrowned.

“It works, but if you want to explore the ocean, fifteen minutes is nowhere near enough time,” she said

I nodded. “I notice that the mana pool my fourth rune holds is significantly larger than my first three runes. Maybe 50% of my mana reserves are coming from just the fourth rune? So if I make a fifth rune, I’ll have 22 minutes, and with a sixth rune I’ll have a full half hour. Even so, the time is really tight, which is unfortunate. I need a way to extend my mana reserves…”

Sallia frowned, before her eyes lit up. “Actually, it’s not that big of a problem, is it? You can absorb some fish cores while underwater to replenish your mana reserves. It’s not like fish cores are rare here - I mean, they aren’t common either, but you can probably afford to stockpile a dozen or so. I don’t think you could even consume that many in a day before running out of absorption essence. It would give you a way to keep your mana reserves up.”

I nodded thoughtfully. Now that Sallia pointed it out, it didn’t seem like a bad idea. As long as I had even half a dozen fish cores, I could just manually replenish the mana I consumed while underwater. It would require me burning some resources, but it was certainly viable. Sallia, who hadn’t noticed me thinking, was getting increasingly excited as she spoke.

“In fact, it’s not that hard for you to acquire fish cores with your ability, either. There aren’t many villagers who can heal flesh, and most people only heal bones or blood. Since that’s the case, you can heal people and just charge a fish core for your healing services, whenever the injury is severe enough. It shouldn’t be that hard to amass a small fortune that way - and it probably won’t cut off your intention of becoming a fisherman, either. You can spend a good chunk of your mana reserves hunting fish for the day, then spend the rest healing people at night to empty your runes, and repeat. And you might even get Achievement for Healing people, in addition to the Achievement you’ll get for hunting Great Fish!”

I grinned. “I’ll let the village chief know of my new intentions.”

Felix also grinned. 

“All right, that’s one of my two objectives down. Now, I also wanted to-” I paused, suddenly struck by a thought.

“Hey, my abilities from my runes aren’t rare, are they?”

“Not really. I mean, I don’t think most people start with the idea of ‘dividing one concept into multiple concepts’ for their runes, the way you turned the entire Ocean into a three-part image for your runes, but I know some villagers do similar things. And healing isn’t a rare concept either. It’s not common, but there are certainly other villagers that can heal. Why do you ask?” Felix asked, curious.

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However, I saw Sallia also frowning, as she put together what I was thinking about.

“No, Felix, the problem is that Miria’s ability to survive underwater only requires one rune. So it’s not that hard to replicate her ability. The outsiders have a much higher population than our village, meaning there are a greater quantity of weird and off the wall abilities due to sheer population variance. Since they also have resources rich in mana in their homeland…”

Felix finally got it.

“Ah. Maybe a few of the outsiders escaped, even after the village chief thought he wiped them out,” he said, frowning. “In that case, what does that mean?”

“It means the village might need to fight against the outsiders again someday,” said Sallia, her face morphing into a frustrated expression. “The outsider ships were really heavily damaged when they came to our shores, which means they were fighting either sea creatures or other humans. Either way, it means that accessing this area should hopefully be hard enough that they won’t devote time and resources to us for now, but who knows how long that will remain true? Once they nail down where our islands are, or whenever they finish fighting with whoever they’re fighting…”

Felix’s eyes hardened. “They might return. Now that I think about it, the village chiefs have remained on very good terms ever since the outsiders came. I thought it was just a sense of camaraderie left over from the battle, or a recognition that another similar situation might happen someday, but… The amount of resources and effort the other villages spent helping us rebuilding does seem a little unusual, now that I think about it.”

Sallia nodded. “The village chiefs are the heads of each village, and they’ve seen just how ridiculously varied rune abilities can be. Plenty of the more combat-oriented abilities are a bit more generic, and help people hit harder or use their environment as projectiles. However, runes can do all sorts of weird things. Even if none of the outsiders had a rune exactly like Miria’s, it’s not far-fetched to think one, or even a few of them, might have survived or found a way to send a message back to Megailia. And I doubt the village chiefs are unaware of this fact, which is why they’re making sure to stick together and remain on good terms with each other. They did their best to wipe out any problems, but they’re fully aware they might have failed even after doing their best. The outsiders may or may not have sent word back - but the village chiefs are preparing as if they have, just in case.”

After thinking about it, I nodded. The behavior of the village chiefs matched up with Sallia’s speculation - the village chief of our village said that he should have extinguished the threat of the outsiders, but with how many strange rune abilities there were, it was almost impossible to know for certain. So all of the village chiefs were being cautious, just in case. In the past three years, nobody had seen a reappearance of the outsiders, but that didn’t mean they weren’t ever going to show up again.

I sighed, rubbing my temples. “Should we mention my ability to the village chief then?”

“I’m betting the village chiefs are already prepared for something to have gone wrong, but just in case it’s not a bad idea to mention it,” said Felix, after some thinking. “Since you’re planning on becoming a fisherman, you’ll need to talk to the village chief soon anyway. You can pass the message along while stopping by.” I nodded, before trying to change the topic.

“The other thing I wanted to do was try out my new rune in combat,” I said. It was a bit of a clumsy redirection, but we couldn’t do anything about the outsiders for now, and it seemed like the village chiefs were already trying to make preparations for the problem already. Since that was the case, there was no point in worrying about it. We would deal with any future problems when they came.

Felix forced himself to grin, and after a few moments, Sallia followed suit.

“Which one of us do you want to fight first?” Asked Felix. “If all you can do is make a flash of light, it’ll be pretty hard to get use out of your rune right now, and we don’t use real weapons while sparring. So healing is pretty useless in a spar.”

“She should fight you, Felix,” said Sallia. “You know how to use rune abilities in combat, and I don’t. You can offer her a lot more useful ideas than I can, although I’ll obviously still offer advice if I think of something. But right now Miria seems to struggle just to use her ability in practical ways. The illusion ability, especially, seems hard for her to use because of her low Intelligence Stat.”

Felix nodded, and I also felt Sallia’s words made sense. The two of us grabbed a pair of training swords and prepared for a spar. Sallia moved off to the side, as our referee. She gave us both a glance, before she grinned. “Start!” 

After Sallia gave us the signal, I immediately leapt towards Felix. Since I was already low on mana and he had more runes than me, he would last longer in a drawn out fight. I made the nearby water detonate into flashes of light, but since he knew I could turn water into lights, Felix blinked with perfect timing and ignored my distraction.

I still thrust my weapon towards his stomach, but he parried my sword away, leaving my stomach undefended. He stabbed towards me, and I burned some mana to speed up my movements and dodge. 

Felix burned some mana as well, giving himself a burst of speed as he tried to follow up with an overhand swing, forcing me to burn even more mana as I reset my position. I swapped to an underarm guard, and swung my blade upwards as if I meant to clash with his sword head-on. He grinned as he spent more mana, amplifying his strength and speed, and right as he prepared for a clash of blades I turned more water into flashes of light.

This time, I finally caught him off guard. He was blinded for a moment, and I took advantage of his distraction. I dodged out of the way of his sword, before thrusting towards his neck. He blinked, and then his sword bent in midair to knock my blade out of the way, before a chunk of house from behind me grabbed me by the leg. I stumbled, trying to tear my foot out of the awkward position as I made another wave of light. This time, Felix didn’t fall for it. He burned another chunk of mana to speed himself up, and as I tried to parry his blow, his sword bent in midair before he tapped me on the neck with his blade.

“Miria dies. Felix wins,” said Sallia, as I sighed. I hadn’t really expected to win - my new rune wasn’t very easy to use in battle, and I had almost no control over it. Felix’s runes were both combat oriented, and he had much more experienced using them. Still, I was a bit sad that I had such a hard time using my ability in a fight.

“How much mana do you have left?” Asked Sallia.

I checked my mana reserves, before sighing. “I have maybe a tenth left? Converting lots of water into light over and over again is also surprisingly taxing.”

Felix shrugged. “Part of that is just practice - you wasted a lot of your mana while you were trying to blind me, and once you get better at manipulating your rune you won’t waste so much. Actually, I suspect that your illusions will be much cheaper than other rune abilities once you have better control over them - the problem is that you just formed the rune, so you barely even know how to use it.”

Sallia nodded. “Don’t worry, Miria. You’ll definitely learn how to use your ability in a fight with more time. Though, I don’t know if sparring is the right choice right now, if you want to get better at using your rune ability. Some time spent playing with water might help more, until you get the hang of making more complex shapes. Light flashes are nowhere near the limit of your ability, after all.”

I thought about Sallia’s advice for a moment, before I nodded. My rune’s ability would be much more valuable if I could convert my light into something that would throw an opponent off of their guard. For example, if I could create the illusion of another practice sword, and an illusion arm, I could probably throw people off guard since they wouldn’t know which one to defend against. There were probably other uses for my ability, as well, but for now I decided to learn how to make an illusion of my arm, as well as the weapons we used often in training such as spears, swords, and arrows. 

After that, Sallia and Felix began dueling each other, while I rested in the sand. I occasionally took very small handfuls of water and tried to bend them into new shapes, but my control was still abysmal. I needed much more practice. I sighed, before shrugging off my loss and grinning. For now, I couldn’t use my ability very well, but that just meant I needed more practice. My Intelligence was only grade 4, which was a huge hindrance when trying to use an ability as precise and delicate as illusions.

However, I had a Willpower of Grade 7. If there was one thing I was good at, it was succeeding through pure practice, patience, and effort. If I couldn’t succeed yet, it just meant I needed to practice for a few more years.