Runes. Runes are physical drawings or etchings that capture a screenshot of time, the frozen essence of a fragment of magic. They are not necessarily as set in stone as the English alphabet, but rather they are guided by intent, or that’s true as far as I’ve been able to figure out. The more my mind believes that the rune resembles what I think it should accomplish, the more effective it is. Using a circle to seal runes in one section to me allows for a border for containment or sealing, while somehow weaving runes together combines their effect. What I don’t know is how it will affect their use if other people are using it themselves.

But Johnny’s barely intelligible speech kicked off a pebble in my mind resulting in an avalanche of ideas that I didn’t have nearly enough time to work through. The simplest of these is runic tattoos, but that’s just the beginning. If I could make a runic tattoo on someone’s skull to prevent mental tampering, then why couldn’t I do something crazy awesome with it, like inscribing a rune of fire on someone’s hand so they can use a ‘fiery punch’? The first answer that that my mind supplied for me is that it might be incredibly painful. If someone had a rune of fire inscribed on their hand, and they tried to use it, it might set their hand on fire. It doesn’t necessarily make them fireproof, or does it?

Maybe these runes would work on clothing, and maybe there are ways to make the runes themselves even more powerful. Using flesh sorcery to darken someone’s skin into the shape of a rune was child’s play for my abilities, but what if I actually made my own ink and planned out a beautiful rune set and then painstakingly etched it on someone’s skin while imbuing that with mana? Would it work better then? What if the individual is not actually able to use magic, what then? All of these questions and more raced through my head as the deadline for our trip loomed over my head like an avenging storm ready to unleash all hell. But what if?

Is a conscious mind with the ability to intelligently think required for runes to operate? Could I tattoo a freaking deer and turn it into an indestructible idiot herbivore, or would it simply be a useless feature? The issue of my amazing abilities is that even I don’t know what I’m capable of, and I truly need at least ten years to flesh out what my actual capabilities are. Every time I learn something new, it’s like I discovered a whole new science with its own fields of study. The only reason I’m not going insane from curiosity is that I know that I can reverse old age on myself, which theoretically gives me a semblance of immortality. I could literally be one of the most powerful semi-mortals in the universe if I kept this up. But do I have enough time right now?

Speaking of time, the answer to that is no. My brother is somewhere in Florida and I have no freaking clue what’s going on down there. He could be hurt or dead for all I know right now and giving myself a week to get ready was more than enough. Actually making the temporary melanin tattoos was easy, the hard part was planning it. After Johnny’s accidental spark of unwitting genius, I locked myself away in my under-river hideout so I could draw runes on the stone walls of the cavern in peace. I wanted to do this right, but in order to do that successfully I needed to put off this trip. Unfortunately, that was not an option. My deadline was in two days, and I wanted to have my plans laid out and the temporary tattoos on everyone by tomorrow so we could have a day of testing before setting out.

The part of me that was actually having a good time was my inner psychopath. That guy had come up with some incredibly wicked ideas just in case it was a no-win situation, but that was something I didn’t want to dwell on. Those particular bits of fun were stashed away in a leather pouch sitting in front of me, it almost seemed to have its own presence as I didn’t really want to be near it. Setting that on the floor a good teen feet away, I sat back down at the stone table. It was cool, but the runes I had carved out in front of me earlier on the wall gave off more heat than I was expecting. The concept of fire was grasped in the grip of lightning, a weird sentence but it was how I was imagining it. Literally, it was a clenched fist holding a lightning bolt that somehow was also on fire. It was how my mind was picturing plasma. It doesn’t really make perfect technical sense as plasma is superheated gas like the kind that stars produce, but my artistic license was only letting me etch this.

Using earth sorcery, I wiped away another attempt at putting elemental runes together. Human bodies are just too frail. The entire morning was spent trying to put runes of fire or lightning or plasma on my body, but actually attempting to use them resulted in my body getting burned or electrocuted or ‘plasmafied’, if that’s even a word. All I know is that it fucking hurt. The runes that showed promise so far were runes of regeneration, which looked like a miniature salamander, strength, which resembled the Arm and Hammer logo, and hardness or defense, which looked like Roman tower shield. Those ones went on easy, actually performed as expected when mana was channeled into them, and made me feel like I had accomplished something. The others, well, the others made me feel like I had a future in high energy explosives.

Sitting back in my chair staring at a clean slate, a weird thought popped into my head. Maybe the rune stuff wasn’t working because it was somewhat against my nature. I am not a sorcerer of fire, or energy, or lightning, but of water, earth, nature, flesh, and mind are. Not having anywhere near the amount of time that I wanted, I stopped wasting it and got back to work. Conjuring a small block of granite, I let inspiration take over. Using my earth sorcery, I inscribed a defense rune on the front of it, a small cartoonish looking bomb in a tree on the bottom for explosive growth, and sharp points on the back of it. On the side, I did my best to put a tiny picture of a gnarly thorn bush on it and then pulled a tiny seed from my pocket. Giving it a quick kiss for good luck, I infused energy into it and pushed the seed into the granite cube which willingly swallowed the implant. Conjuring a small bit of quartz the size of a pencil eraser, I filled it with energy and pushed that in the cube so that it was touching the seed.

Chuckling evilly to myself, I quickly made a handful more and stuck them in secret compartments in Svalinn. Those bad boys were the magical upgraded version of caltrops. I’d be able to chuck them anywhere and the runes would cause the seed to quickly grow into a bush covered in super hard granite thorns. They could be used to clog up doorways, create dangerous obstacles, and what made it even better is that due to the seed, I’d even be able to control the rock covered mutant plant if I wanted. I would totally give some credit to Meliad for helping me with this particular idea. The blend of living plant and impenetrable rock had so many uses that I hadn’t even begun to tap.

The next contraption was even deadlier. I called them ‘cryoshards’. The name wasn’t that inventive, but it was better than the name for the last trap, “planttrops’, the combination of ‘plant’ and ‘caltrops’. This concept was much simpler, but far deadlier in so many ways. I conjured small shards of sapphire in the shape of playing cards, one side being etched with a skull inside a whirlpool and the other with a picture of rock being broken open by a hammer. Now these worked one of two ways, the first is that I could slap the sapphire card to a door or a wall skull side down so that the broken rock and hammer was showing and the card would use the ambient mana in the air to completely drain the heat out of the object it was touching while pumping cold magic into it rendering the object extremely brittle. Or, I could pump the card full of mana and slap it broken rock side down and the skull side whirlpool would not only explode out a wave of cold but it would suck out all the energy from the object that it was attached to.

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My earth sorcery could work as an easy delivery system for both sets of destructive creations, but my water sorcery has been left out of my strategic thinking for too long. It’s obviously an incredible asset if I’m near a body of water, but conjuring water to use it in battle is far slower than using the resources that I already have around me. Now, don’t get me wrong, conjuring water is fairly fast, but I have so many options available that are simply faster. In a rainstorm though, I’d probably be unstoppable. Taking off my armor, I set it down in front of me all perfectly laid out. What if I could take the slower part of water sorcery out of the equation. The issue isn’t really that it’s slow, it’s that I only have so much brain power and can only do so many things at a time. Part of this can be mitigated by my consciousness sorcery, but I am limited. What exactly limits me? The presence of water or lack thereof slightly limits me. Nature and earth and flesh all either all around me all the time or literally make up my body, but water is in my blood, so using that as a medium for combat isn’t conducive to longevity. I mean, the stuff that literally keeps you alive shouldn't be the stuff you fight with.

Tracing the kinetic runes on my armor that absorbed impacts, I idly found my finger making squiggly lines that kind of looked like waves. A mental ping went off. Closing my eyes, I started to meditate. Earlier in the week, I realized that even though I had consciousness sorcery, I still couldn’t actively use one-hundred percent of my brain. Some of that was sectioned off for regulating my physical body, a large chunk went into my conscious thinking, but the other part was my unconscious mind. What I discovered was that somehow my unconscious was capable of a lot more than I had ever given it credit for. Using my mind sorcery, I created several processes wrapped in a question and sent them into that part of my brain. It was manual input of what normally happens to other people when they go to bed with a problem, sleep on it, and somehow wake up later with the answer. Their unconscious mind worked it out. Sometimes, the conscious mind just gets in the way, and that ping noise, was my unconscious mind spitting out an answer to a question I gave it days ago, how can I better use my magic?

Water is motion. Motion is kinetic energy. Water is always moving, even if it’s a lake, there’s always the wind making a soft ripple or a fish splashing around. Water also fits to the shape of any container it is in, and frozen water can move too. Glaciers reshape landscapes with inexorable power. Holding this in my mind, I began to draw runes of oceans on the flat parts of my armor while carefully drawing runes of winding rivers at or near the joints. At the center of my chest plate and the center of my back plate, I carefully molded a fist sized circle with runes inside. A book to represent knowledge and the mind, all of the elements that I had control off and a miniature stick figure to represent my armor. Then, sectioning off a small piece of my mind and forming it into a situation specific subroutine, I devoted that to water auto-conjuration duty via the runes of my armor.

Perfect. Not only would the kinetic and water runes work together to absorb impacts and keep the joints working smoothly, but in the midst of combat, I could just order my suit via the water runes to constantly conjure water and that would free me up to use it. Cutting out an entire step might just save my ass in combat, and because water doesn’t get in the way in the same manner as earth or nature, it shouldn’t cause any issue in regards to impeding movement.

After putting more runes on my armor, I then pulled out seeds from a thorny vine I’d collected earlier and pushed them into my armor so that they were just below the surface. Etching a rune of control and fast growth on top of it was easy, and I grinned evilly again. Nobody would suspect me to sprout vampiric vines if combat got too close for comfort, and if I keep up this evil look on my face, I might have to use flesh sorcery to fix that later.

Now for the pièce de résistance, I pulled out a sealed stone box that I had stored away what felt like eons ago. Some of my Chaos altered minerals and metals from during the Sixth Ripple had been tucked away and I had almost forgotten about them. Outfitting Johnny and Reeanth with awesome gear actually wasn’t that much of a plus or minus for me in any personal way. I made sure that I didn’t give them anything too powerful, but in reality, their gear was practice for me. Some of those runes I had to redo due to impractical resonance, and working on different things helped me learn more than anything here so far. The truly epic items were Svalinn and Gungnir, but losing the active slice of Gungnir seriously hurt my combat potential. The armor I wore made up for it some and the consciousness sorcery picked up the slack, but there had to be something else that I could make.

Touching the box with my finger, my earth sorcery cracked the lid open. A hunk of Chaos infused gold set next to a hefty bar of silver that seemed to undulate in the yellow light of the firestone. These plus a perfectly preserved dragon corpse that I still had in stasis could make gear epic enough that nerds would tell tall tales about it for centuries, if only I had the fucking know how to actually use the resources at my disposal. Again, having Gungnir hack the brains in the crystal brain vat would have been useful, but another ping kicked an idea from my unconscious to the forefront of my mind. Who truly deserves lovingly crafted, handmade magical gear other than my most faithful companion?

Shaping the right gauntlet of Svalinn into ten inch razor, I walked over to the gaint freezer where Rath’s body lay. The section of his body that I wanted was easy to get to. After climbing into the freezer, I hacked at the wing joint where it connected to the shoulder and did the same for the other. With both wings off, I tossed them to the side and began the worst part, getting to the hamstring. An hour of delicate cutting and cuss-word laden hacking later, I pulled yards of tendon out of the damn dragon and laid it next to the severed wings. Damn, this is gonna take forever.

Suffice to say, I didn’t get to sleep as much that night as I wanted. It took two hours just to cut the thick tendons up the way I wanted, and the skin of the wing was plenty soft for what I wanted, but the real prize was the skin on the tops of the bones. That was the toughest but most useful skin I could get to. Weaving it all together into a giant collar took forever compared to the three hours of enchanting I put into it. Where a dog tag would be, I put the Chaos-infused gold that I had shaped into a shield shaped pentagon and stuck the firestone inside of it. Then, using earth sorcery, I stroked the rippling silver until it became super thin wire which I wove into the fibers of the makeshift collar.

I hooked up the gold pendant with a mana link to the river kinetic converter runes so it could charge up to the max amount while I worked. Surprisingly, the gold held about fifty times the amount of energy than all of my crystal batteries did put together. When the charging was done, I etched into the firestone the most complicated set of dependency runes that I could. An unconscious control rune denoted by a brain with z’s floating around it was the big one, and inside of it were runes of fire control and healing as well as durability and energy containment. My whole goal of making this elaborate collar was two-fold. The first was to beef up my part dragon, fire and flesh sorcery wielding mutt as much as magically possible, but the second was also a test case. Does enchanting with resonating materials create a better product?