Alright, if I’m going to go off and rescue those poor fuckers, I’m going to need to prepare. With the power of runes, my greatest resource other than electricity or infinite steel, and iron is prep time.

I know that I’m going to be trawling through corridors with that mysterious mother fucker. And it’s not going to be easy. So I need a weapon, and I won’t settle for just a random blaster wand I have lying around this needs to be perfect.

But it needs to be something new. Considering how it has human servants, and all of my current weapons would probably murder them.

Ugh, it makes me want to spew chunks when I think about how many lethal weapons I have lying around.

Why do I have them lying around anyway?

Well, most of my enemies were either inanimate objects, or rocketing ant corpses, both of which are pretty resoundingly fine to slice and dice.

Although, given my own terrible mistake with the Spirit of Language, I shouldn't be too hasty with that.

But it makes sense I just stockpiled them because that's what you're supposed to do …

Wait, was my reasoning really as blindingly simple as that? Like someone grinding out levels by mindlessly making a dozen iron daggers and then enchanting them.

And this isn’t a game; I can’t reload to a previous save; I’m going to be in charge of saving the lives of many people. People who aren’t empty husks just there as a checkpoint but living beings with hopes and dreams. Dreams that will be turned into nothing but ashes if something happens to them before I get there.

I sigh, removing myself from that stream of thought before I wander down roads best left untrod. I force myself to think more productive thoughts, like, what concept would be the best to disable an enemy without murdering them?

The best way to start with an enchantment is not with a perfect desired outcome but with an idea that you can mold until it works well enough.

Well, something that would excellently disable most would be a pain ray, and pain nullification would be a top-priority enchantment.

When you think about the fact that until around two to three centuries ago the vast majority of anesthesiology was just whatever drugs you had on hand, and that a warrior without pain would be incredibly effective.

And since a pain rune undoubtedly exists, it would be trivial to do the opposite and amplify pain. I would be falling along the grooves of the intended enchantments.

For while manhandling the runes and concepts can lead to strange and unique enchantments, doing what the runes are made for usually makes the creation process fairly painless.

Unlike what I would be doing with my new pain ray.

I twitch, feeling my mind return to the easy pattern of before, treating my enemies like they aren't real before forcing myself to consider the truth. If I shoot a pain ray at them, it doesn't matter if it incapacitates them if I'm essentially torturing them.

And what happens if someone just keeps walking after getting hit?

Anyone who has pushed through a heavy wound could possibly just keep attacking me, especially since there's a decent chance my opponent might not even have nerves, to begin with!

So far, 100% of my enemies would be immune to this theoretical pain ray. So no, not a pain ray.

Well, what else could I do? Hmm, if the main problem with a pain ray is that anyone with sufficient willpower could ignore it, why not just flat-out stop them from moving or attempting to kill you?

And since a freeze ray or other cold methods of incapacitation could potentially inflict frostbite or kill them, a better option would be paralysis.

Why mess around with causing extreme pain when I can just seize their nerves? And say, "Nuh-uh, better try again later!"

But wait, from what I understand, paralysis is supposed to be one of the most terrifying experiences in all of existence.

The feeling of being unable to move or do anything while being completely vulnerable while others are free to do whatever they want would essentially be as torturous as the pain ray.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

And if I mess it up, I could permanently disable someone or suffocate them to death by paralyzing their lungs. No, paralysis is off the table.

But something similar to paralysis but less torturous would be a sleep enchantment. And similar to pain I’m sure any society with such a magic as enchantment would create a way for babies to fall gently to sleep.

So with blinding speed, I carve into the ready wand the requisite runes. Obviously, a sleep rune scavenged from the book of runes the shape of a closed eye, along with a paired set of runes made to transfer the outlined effects to the end of an invisible ray. All elegantly twining around a third of the wand.

I sigh, wishing that I could test it out, but I can’t waste that much time going to sleep, so it’ll have to go into battle as a prototype.

Even if I dearly desire to turn it on myself. Even if I apparently don't need to sleep, it's still not healthy to ignore your body.

But now that I know the piece de resistance of the wand, I should consider the idea that’s been swirling around in my mind. The reason I only carved a third of the wand.

That new idea formed around the recharge function. It is its own mini enchantment placed on the same enchantment, that uses entirely different concepts than the original enchantment.

This means that the issue of it being impossible, or at the very least not possible yet, to cast two different spells of different types can be solved. And I can slap multiple enchantments on one wand so that it can do many things.

So now that I have a new enchantment, what other enchantments would be suitable to also be on a nonlethal weapon?

Hmm, I need to move around, and if I’m going to be holding a wand, I can’t exactly windwave with it to quickly push myself around. So why don’t I also add a feature to blast me around?

I already have several wind-blaster wands, so all I have to do is copy it over! Easy peasy lemon squeezy; all I have to do is Button-Air-Target/Point-Blast. So with frankly mind-numbing ease, I do just that.

Grabbing a blank wand from the ones you can find everywhere, the things ruinously easy to access. I create the standard enchantment that I could practically do in my sleep and fire it off at the ground!

Only for me not to budge an inch while the stray bits of iron dust on the factory floor get swept away. I groan, remembering my earlier discovery with the imaginary fire.

What I produce with wands is not the actual substance but rather something closer to the idea of the substance, and those who created the rune didn't know about Newton's Third Law.

Thankfully enough, it is easy to fix; all I have to do is add a Permanent rune, and then the air will respond to the laws of physics.

So with a quick, practiced motion, I carve the Permanent rune and then connect it to the Air rune in a continuous cycle. Before pressing the button on the practice wand, pushing off the floor, and tumbling into the astral sky.

I twist and turn, swiveling about so that I don't crash into the lattice ceiling, roaring uproariously as I see glimpses of the beauty of the astral expanse and the machines chugging along in the background of a frozen-over planet of meat.

Falling onto the floor like a leaf on the wind setting back down onto the ground, I wipe away a tear of joy. With a giggle still on my face, I get back to my desk and start working on the next enchantment to be added to the wand.

A wall enchantment, due to the simple fact that being able to quickly create metal, and ice means that I would gain superiority battlefield control-wise easily anywhere.

I could put walls in front of a charging golem, and then hold it down with a crag of ice. I could use walls to box in an impending explosion, to create platforms to navigate around, and surfaces to walk on.

A wall-summoning enchantment would be really useful. But as I look through the targeting section of the book, I realize that I've got a massive problem on my hands, simply put, how the hell does the wall work? It’s not like the enchantment can read my mind.

But if I were to do some type of measurement, I would only be able to summon walls like 5 ft away from me, and if I was being bum-rushed and then they went closer than 5ft I would be screwed. I would most likely be able to eventually work around it, but it would create quite the obvious flaw that others could easily exploit.

And I can’t exactly make a standard cone shape or line like my usual wands because then I would probably just summon a spray of metal walls, creating more of a shrapnel blaster wand than a wall maker.

Hmm, but one thing other than that would be the ray enchantment I used for the sleep one; it doesn’t have any distance for the effect, and with the paired enchantment it does so on its surface. It would also create a problem, but it doesn’t have such an obvious solution as to simply get closer to me.

Grabbing a blank wand in order to test my idea out I scribe onto it. Button-Ray-Target/Point-Reaction/Hit-Metal-Permanent-Shape/Wall. And blast the nearby ice with the enchantment. An invisible ray shoots out of the tip of the wand, hitting the surface of the icy planet, and out of the point pops out a wall!

Embedded in the ice in the entirely wrong direction. I facepalm, groaning into my hands as I smell the specter of a difficult tweaking period. My eyes twitch as I grab another empty wand, ready to try again.

Well, the problem seems to be alignment, but it should be easily solved due to someone spending an extensive amount of time creating math-related runes. And it wasn't basic either hells, I don't think I could find a better one before the golden age of islam and the invention of calculas. Something that happens thousands of years after these events.

Considering how much they've done for me I should really figure out who took the time to make the dozens of series of runes, necessary to have a fully functional magical mathematical system.

And thankfully enough, that kind benefactor also made an angle rune series. So if I just add a rune in there so that I summon it at a 90 degree angle, I should be fine. But, hmm, I don’t have any runes to alter with the Angle/Quarter. Well, I do have the option of using the Summon rune, but that would be dangerously off course.

The summon rune, when paired with the fact that spirits are real, is apparently made to summon spirits of various strength. Which I doubted earlier, but given that I can literally fucking see spirits outside my windows, I obviously don’t doubt their existence now.

But with a sigh, I go through with the plan; the option in front of me. I put onto the wand Button-Ray-Target/Point-Reaction/Hit-Summon=Angle/Quarter-Metal-Permanent-Shape/Wall onto the wand. Before, with a lazy flick, I shoot it at the ice floor out side, only for it curiously to summon a wall at a perfect 90-degree angle.

But it has nothing to do with the floor and everything to do with me. As it is summoned, not in alignment with the floor but to me, again embedding the conjured wall in the ice, as it forces itself into existence in an extremely out of place fashion. I sigh, bemoaning the incredible specificity required to make an enchantment and not completely and utterly fuck it up.

And with every additional complexity, the time required to perfect the enchantment increases. No, I need to solve this now, aligning it properly will probably take days of experimentation, days that I don't have, so what solution can I implement now?

Looking at the plates wedged into the ice, the real problem with this enchantment isn’t that it isn’t aligned with the ground it’s that it’s flimsy, hell I can see it wiggling around in the crunched ice right now!

So if I just make them stay in place, it should be okay enough. I can’t melt them in place considering the many environments I could use this in, but what else could I do?

Hmm, if the problem is that it doesn’t stick, then let’s use the Sticky rune so that it essentially glues itself to surrounding things. Frantically, with a grin on my face, I carve into the metal of yet another wand. Button-Ray-Target/Point-Reaction/Hit-Summon-Metal=Sticky-Permanent-Shape/Wall. And blast it into the ice!

It forms a wall that looks exactly the same as before, so I carefully approach and poke at the metal wall with my wand to see if it would budge, but when I touch it, I am surprised when I cannot pull it away!

I grin looking at the success before hooting and hollering, blasting the want everywhere! Little 5 by 5 sticky metal walls embedding themselves into the ground and sticking to the ice around them, as I conjure dozens of my now successful walls. And with a whistle, I spin around the wand before blowing away imaginary smoke.

But as I look at the landscape, I sigh, suddenly realizing that I'm going to have to fix this random ass mess myself, before logging in my notebook the success of both the theoretical enchantments and the greater multifunction prototype.

And frankly, this is only the start of what I could do with this wand. It has multiple buttons that could theoretically be pressed at the same time, allowing for multiple effects at once.

I could push someone that I’m putting to sleep so that they don’t clobber me with momentum or create walls for me to push off with my wind, I can’t exactly combine the wall and sleep considering I would most likely just be punching an unconscious person with a wall, but these multimodal, more complicated enchantments can be extremely useful.

This is the start of my journey toward better, more complex enchantments that create intricate effects.

So with a burning fire in my heart I grab another wand from the dozens I made with a mold, and carve anew, forging my own path with ferocity.

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