Obliteration. That was the singular word that came to mind.

It began with a shake, just a gentle rumble felt in the very fabric of the world, a prelude of what was to come. The world slowed to a halt, time itself freezing in fear of what great power had just reared its terrible head. Then, something zipped through the forest, starting from the silhouette’s palm and shooting outward, some kind of invisible force concentrated into a beam that punctured meter-wide holes straight through the trunks of whatever poor trees happened to be in its way. Those only partially in the way received only partial punctures, craters left in their sides like bites from a massive animal.

Then came the pressure, an otherworldly, indescribable, terrifying pressure that descended upon the entire world, warning of the terrible might that had been unleashed.

Then, came the obliteration. Every tree in front of the silhouette, every single one of the tens of thousands of the behemoths, simply disintegrated. Even in the halted state of time, the destruction was instantaneous, every bit of matter above the earth and a meter below pulverized to a fine dust within the tiniest fraction of a second. My view suddenly opened up, going from only a few dozen meters to dozens of kilometers. In the far, far horizon, I could make out the trees still being powderized as the shockwave continued to travel out.

Then came a great rumble, a great roar that shook the earth to its bones, hundreds of times more terrifying than the most violent of thunder. The space before the silhouette exploded once more, this time kicking up a gigantic cloud of the dust left behind by the annihilated trees. The cloud rose to a towering hundred meters at the least, and was so wide I could not see its edges.

Then, just as the cloud reached its zenith, another shockwave parted the great wall of dust, blowing away the particles and clearing the air once again.

With the dust cleared away, I was greeted with one of the grandest sights I’d ever seen in my life. A deep gorge had appeared directly at the feet of the silhouette, an unnaturally straight line that seemed to bisect the very world in half, running so far off in each direction I could not see where it stopped. And the world beyond the line was apocalyptic, utterly annihilated. Not a shred of the grand and towering forest’s majesty remained. A pit fifty meters deep was dug into the ground, stretching out far into the horizon, as far as my eye could see.

The utter magnitude of the destruction left me speechless, hardly able to form a thought in the moment. I could do nothing but gape at the absurd, nonsensical scale of the power I had just witnessed. I could not understand how such strength was possible; it defied everything I had thought attainable for a mage. In a sense, I’d always known that the sky was the limit for mages, but knowing it and seeing something of the scale I could see were entirely different things.

The entire process had taken less than a second of real-time – the only reason I’d been able to see the events was because, for a reason so far beyond me I didn’t even bother to try and guess why, time had slowed as the events had taken place – but I knew it was less than a second because I had begun to fall to my knees just as the rune was shattered, and I hit the ground only after the attack had already done its work.

I sat in stupefied shock for a long moment before cognition finally seeped back into my head. And with it came a surge of excitement, excitement at the mere idea that the power I was just shown could potentially, one day, be mine to wield. With this one rune, I was confident that no one on the planet would be able to match me – given that I cultivated it to the level of silhouette, of course. Which may have been a faraway dream at the moment, but I was filled with a determination like nothing I’d ever felt before, and I knew that it would only be a matter of time before I reached that level. I felt it in my bones.

Spurred on by the flood of resolve, I gathered my scattered wits and picked myself back up. As I did, I felt a strange current run along the length of my body. I saw a strange smoke curl around me before gently lifting me up off the ground. As I started to float, the silhouette did too, and the two of us floated down the massive abyss and landed on the dirt at the bottom.

The silhouette moved again as we landed, moving in exactly the same movements as before as it began to create the exact same rune.

I was confused at first, but my many questions were answered before I could even formulate them. The silhouette completed the rune, with exactly the same level of innate perfection that the first one had, but a marked difference in its presence. This one felt dead, as opposed to the first one, which felt far more dangerous and alive. The universe did not react to it, did not cower in its presence. Like it was inanimate, dormant.

The answer to my questions came after the silhouette completed the rune. Instead of shattering it like the first one, the silhouette simply left it floating in the air. With that job complete, the silhouette itself slowly disappeared, fizzling out like a match without fuel.

Left alone in the massive clearing of dirt, I quickly realized what the purpose of it all was. The initial display of the rune was to show the potential power of the Arte, and to create a field in which to practice. And the second was for reference, the ideal that I was to attempt to match up to.

With a grin on my face, I set out to do exactly that. Sure, I didn’t have any kind of actual guidance on how I was supposed to achieve that, no real clue really on where to even start, but that didn’t matter to me. I’d relied on myself to learn almost everything I knew about fighting, so the prospect of starting from nothing wasn’t so daunting in my eyes.

First things first, I thought, I need to figure out how to even paint using Flux.

With a deep breath, I copied the stance of the silhouette as best I could from memory and began to gather my Flux at the tip of my outstretched finger. The power gathered as I dictated, amassing within my body to its limits before beginning to slowly leak out as the black vapor I was used to seeing it in.

No, this isn’t right, I realized. The silhouette’s finger had begun to glow with a light, the very light it used to write on the space before it. While smoke still rose from her finger, the majority of the Flux seemed to manifest in a different form.

I paused at that. …a different form? I thought, an idea dawning on me.

To confirm my suspicion, I broke out of my stance and carefully – very carefully – made my way over to the floating rune. After all, as sure as I was that what the author of the Arte had left behind wouldn’t kill me, I wasn’t so sure as to casually mess with something as dangerous as the silhouette’s rune.

I approached the thing cautiously, but my worries were unfounded, as I’d expected. The thing did not react at all to my approach, simply floating and glowing, almost docilely. Though that was a strange word to use for something capable of wreaking such immense destruction as it was.

My approach also confirmed my initial guess, fortunately. The light that composed the rune gave off an unfamiliar feeling, not at all like pure Flux, which was what I’d assumed was being used to create the rune.

Which meant I had to convert my Flux into another form, the light form that the silhouette had shown, in order to create runes. That would be my first hurdle. And, of course, I hadn’t the first clue on how to start.

To get that clue, I examined the rune as closely as I dared to, trying to understand the qualities of the form I had to convert my Flux into. I assumed that the light form was still a form of pure energy, the same as Flux was, which meant that conversion between the two should not be a difficult task. If my body could convert Flux to flame, converting to another form of pure energy would be a walk in the park, given I had the blueprint.

I closed my eyes and slowed my breathing, sitting down cross-legged as close to the rune as I dared to be, trying to focus on the feeling of the energy. As vague as it was, it was the best idea I could come up with then, so it was what I stuck with.

And it yielded good results, too. Slowly, but definitely results. It was a game of comparing the aura of my own pure Flux, and slowly modifying it to match the aura of the light energy. So, as one would expect from a game of matching such fuzzy concepts, it required intense and prolonged focus, yielded frustratingly halting progress, and arbitrary work.

Still, in the face of unshaking resolve, the chaotic puzzle slowly began to show order, the progress getting faster as I got better at the work, my understanding of the light energy deepening with it.

It took a total of two hours – as best I could tell since the world seemed frozen at midday – but eventually, the conversion yielded success. I copied the style I’d first used with Leonard to convert my Flux to flame: cupping my two hands together and funneling as much Flux as I could into the space between my palms. The dark smoke curled and swirled, dancing its intricate dance for a long time before I finally succeeded. Every bit of Flux that I let seep out of my skin, I attempted to convert to the light energy, but it never worked. There was always something missing from the aura, some mismatch that would result in the conversion failing, and the product yielding regular Flux.

But, when I succeeded, the effect was instantaneous. All of a sudden, dim golden white light glowed from within the ball of swirling black, the color muddied but nonetheless present.

That inimitable high of hard work paying off coursed through my veins as the glow of the energy lit up my face. The conversion wasn't perfect, of course, not at first. The light held traces of dark Flux within, unlike the utterly pure light of the silhouette’s energy, but with the first major bit of progress staring me in the face and spurring me on, it was only a matter of time before I reached a satisfactory level of purity in the energy.

A frustratingly long matter of time, I came to find, but after a total of five hours of sitting cross-legged, single-mindedly attempting the same thing over and over and over again, I achieved my first acceptable success of the day.

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Relief crashed over me as I finally allowed myself a moment of rest, falling backwards onto my back as I relished in the afterglow of accomplishment. I had estimated a total of five hours that I had spent in the Arte book’s world, but oddly, my body did not feel the call of hunger, nor that of nature, in the slightest.

What I most certainly did feel, though, was the pain that attacked my legs as I finally un-crossed them. My feet had gone so far beyond numb that my toes felt like another person’s – in that, I didn’t feel them at all. But the pain, intense as it was, was hardly enough to rain on my parade. Taking the first step towards achieving the power of the silhouette was an addictive feeling, and I couldn’t wait to start actually practicing the rune.

I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get out of the Arte world since, for one, Evelyn and Maya had given us the day, and second, I had an inkling that the passing of time in this world was different than in the one outside. It was a wild speculation, of course, without much basis either, but I figured, given all the other things the book was able to do, a little time dilation was not such an impossible feature.

Eventually, I picked myself up off the ground after I’d taken my rest, ready to tackle the next hurdle of my learning. Once again assuming the silhouette’s stance, I mobilized the Flux within me and channeled it into my finger. But this time, I made sure to convert the energy into the form I needed it to be in, altering the very aura of the energy in some innate way, the workings of which I could not explain. My body handled that work; my mind only directed it. With the three-ish hours of practice I’d already put in, I was getting close to doing the conversion subconsciously – like the way I could convert Flux to flame – but I was yet some ways off, still needing to put in minimal conscious effort.

Eventually, I judged the glow around my finger to be enough and cautiously began to draw. I started with just a line, despite the instinct to jump straight to drawing the complex rune. I moved my finger in a line, slowly at first and gradually getting faster as nothing happened. My finger moved through the air, but the light energy didn’t leave my finger.

After an embarrassingly long minute of confusion, the simple solution dawned on me. I did it again, this time pushing the energy off my finger as I needed, having forgotten the basic step in my anticipation.

The attempt succeeded, the energy coming off of my finger and staying in the air, simply floating there before dissipating after a moment.

I allowed myself a grin at the sight. It wasn’t exactly a hurdle overcome, but it was a victory nonetheless. And I’d come to find that allowing myself some happiness at my own victories, even the small ones – especially the small ones – was a great way of keeping my resolve alive.

Moving on to the next step, I started practicing the first rune. The information in the book was somewhat helpful at this stage – at least, in regards to structuring my training. The strength of the Arte came, at least in large part, from the level of 'perfection' the rune was drawn with. Which meant that the secret to a powerful explosion lay in immense practice. And that was one thing I was confident in. I wasn’t so sure about intelligence or anything else that was important in learning, but if there was one thing I could do, it was grind.

And so I began. Standing next to the completed rune, I started to draw the first of them, repeatedly moving my finger in the same strokes, attempting to match the original as closely as possible. At first, my rune would fall apart before I could even complete it, the first stroke disintegrating by the time my inexperienced movements had finished the last.

But, as the minutes ticked by, my movements became smoother, faster. The energy began to last longer, with less of the dark impurities left over by incomplete conversions. By about half past the hour mark, my speed and the purity of the energy met in the middle, allowing me to complete my first-ever rune. I was sweating by then, a strange hunger and emptiness beginning to spread inside me as my Flux reserve closed in on bottoming out.

I breathed out deeply, knowing that my limited reserve was not a restraint I could persevere through, no matter how determined I was. So I took a break, unwilling as I was, and sat down, closing my eyes as I tried to clear my head. Refilling a Flux reserve was an automatic process, not something I could rush aside from getting to a state as close to sleep as possible, and experience told me it would take about an hour to two for me to refill completely, even in a relaxed state.

But as I closed my eyes and moved my sense to the Flux around me, I noticed that it was far more dense than I’d realized. Far denser than the atmosphere in the forest. In my state, I could sense a notable increase in my Flux reserve by the minute, which was far faster than I’d ever seen it before.

This place really is the perfect place to practice, huh, I realized.

Just before the thirty-minute mark passed, I hit the limit of my Flux reserve again, and I joyfully threw myself back into my practice. I was hardly satisfied with the level of proficiency I’d attained with the first rune, so I wasn’t quite ready to move on to the next yet. Instead, I spent the next hour and a half drawing exactly the same runic character over and over and over again. Like before, I got faster and smoother at a noticeable rate, and the energy purer. And since my attempts no longer disintegrated, I could see my own progress as I got better. I’d drawn exactly fifty-six by the time I bottomed out again, and the difference between the first and last was night and day.

I repeated the process again, taking thirty minutes to rest before copying the rune for an hour and a half again. And then I repeated it again, and then again, and again. Five repetitions and ten hours later, my mind was starting to brush up against the limits of its sanity. With a total of fourteen hours spent making the exact same motions, the intense monotony and repetition had driven my mind almost to its breaking point, and I didn’t need a mirror to know my eyes were bloodshot. I could almost feel it in my eyes.

Finally deciding to take a proper break, I left the massive line of runic characters I’d made – a total of 832, give or take a few where I forgot my count – and made my way off into the distance, wanting to get as far away from the place I’d been in as possible, even if the only place I could go was further into the massive dirt field left behind by the explosion.

It occurred to me then that I had no idea how to get out of the Arte’s world, but it didn’t take long for me to stumble across the method. A simple thought was all that was required. With the will given verbal form in my head, I was suddenly whisked away from the world, in much the same way I was brought into it. Darkness overtook my vision for a few moments, before receding to reveal the dirt chamber I’d been in.

There were no windows in the room, no way to check where the sun had moved to, but thankfully, I no longer needed to rely on the sun, ever since Najam had given me the chip.

I called up my status screen casually as I laid back to rest, not caring that it was dirt I was laying on. I stretched my sore legs and shut my sore eyes – having found that I did not need them open to view the holographic screen that the chip could call up.

I was greeted with two pleasant surprises as the screen appeared in the darkness of my vision.

********

Name: Ruby Redthorn

Gender: Female

Age: 18

Level: 20

~~~~~~~

Strength: 22

Agility: 19

Toughness: 21

Mental: 20

Reaction Time: 134 ms

Strike Power: 1430 fin

Flux Reserve: 250/250

~~~~~~~

$#^#: $#@

$#@%: %@#^^$#

********

I hadn’t been expecting any changes in my status, so finding the sudden boost was a greatly welcome thing. In fact, it was the biggest jump I’d ever seen in my level, and the surprise was doubled by the fact that I hadn’t done any kind of physical training, so it didn’t make sense for my Attributes to have shot up.

And, even more strange were the changes in the Attributes, Mental and Flux Reserve. Mental had always been my lowest, and in all my experimentation, I hadn’t found any clues on how to increase it specifically. And Flux Reserve had always been static, ever since I’d first gotten the chip. I’d given up on trying to raise that number, thinking that it was the kind of thing that went up in chunks, like that one time I had felt it go up a bunch after I’d killed my first gorilla.

The changes, unexpected as they were, were good for me, so I didn’t question them much. Even so, the answer revealed itself almost immediately, when I did an internal check-up to see the difference in my Flux reserve.

The reason for the increase in my physical Attributes, I realized, was due to the sudden increase in the quality of my Flux. I could feel it as it ran through my veins. It was leagues better than it had been before I went into the Arte world, and with it powering my body, my physical abilities had shot up as well.

I guess some part of the training I was doing purified and increased my own Flux, I concluded.

The second of the pleasant surprises came in the form of the time. The status screen also showed the current time, in small text in the corner of the screen. And, making an approximate guess since I’d forgotten to check exactly when I’d begun, I estimated that about twenty minutes had passed since I'd entered the Arte world. Coupling that estimate with my approximation of the time I’d spent in the world, which I totalled up to be nineteen hours, I reasoned that it had been exactly nineteen minutes since I’d entered the world, and that the world did indeed have a time dilation effect, as I’d suspected. An effect with the ratio of a minute to an hour, Arte world to outside world.

And that was an amazing discovery, allaying the sneaking fear that had begun to take root in my head: that three days would actually not be enough for me to grasp the rune. But with the time dilation, and such an immense dilation at that, that was no longer a concern.

A smile curved my lips as the comforting fact settled in. I knew I was in for a tough few days, but I was undaunted. In fact, I was almost giddy at the prospect. There were few things I enjoyed more than simple, repetitive tasks that I knew for a fact would yield results. Maybe not so much when I was actually doing them, but the process still brought me comfort.

With a sigh, I turned over on my side and settled in for a nap to recharge my brain. I had much to do, much strength to gain, after all. I’d been given a second chance with this world, a fresh start to redo everything, and that was not a gift many people received in their lives. And there wasn’t a chance I was going to let this opportunity slip away from me because I wasn’t strong enough, and that meant I had to work harder than ever. So that I could truly realize the dream that Ocean and I had risked everything to chase. To make good on the chance that Ocean had given everything to give me.

So that I could live free, and obliterate anyone who ever tried to put me in a cage again.