The next season cycle of Arson’s life was a blur of trials and newly learned runic systems. Where Arson assumed the runic trials would only be simple situations that taught him the language of mana, Manna, and Uni-Vare, he found an entirely different curriculum was provided.
The trials all involved runes, yes, but they also involved, politics, business, and combat.
Arson at one point had to create a dam out of runes,. The construct held together by the power of the runes he’d chosen pulled from the ambient mana in the air around the area.
A crescent-shaped wall was formed from the sand and stones of the adjacent shores to either side of the river. Though it slowed the flow, the water pumped through the other side of the wall was pure and refined.
He’d used vacuum-based runes on the interior side of the wall. Created a path through the interior of the wall, lined with purification runes, and created a perfect water filtration system but that was all after he managed to get the local town mayor to agree to the venture. He knew he wasn’t in his own realm, as the system twisted his words into an unknown language, and the sky was lit by 3 purple suns of various shades.
“He enjoyed his travels, and was so engaged by the trials he began to worry less and less about the time he spent away from home.
“The dam should last for as long as you or someone else with sufficient mana infuses the runes regularly,” said Arson, who yelled unnecessarily as the sound of a turbine filled his ears. The mayor gave him an odd look and a nod, before he glanced at the massive runic construct worth more than his entire town. A marvel Arson created for mana stones so large he couldn’t appraise the value of them easily.
The man was unable to catch sight of Arson again, before he disappeared. The mayor of the town simply shrugged and scratched his head completely lost as to why he and his people had received such a sudden blessing.
Arson was then off again. A new section of space and time warped into existence around him and he sighed. He’d reached 1,001-0 within the runic skyscraper, and was faced with another test. A test that Arson immediately knew would take him much longer than the previous test took him.
“Protect the innocence of an HonorBorn princess,” said Arson to himself as he read through the prompt and its details.
He looked down at himself and took in the regal dress assigned to him through the magic of the System and trial. He found that he enjoyed the tight fitting clothing, as well as the black and white color scheme his almost uniform-like attire followed.
He then looked around and realized he was on the roof of a castle. Sand filled the grassy landscape all around him, supported by jungle trees and large ponds that spilled into each other.
He found himself frozen by the picturesque scenery. Until he heard a scream. Arson rushed to the roof’s edge and peeked over.
The area in front of the castle was filled with carriages, and aristocratic citizens of whatever kingdom Arson had been placed in. The large group collected themselves around a hanging post. He was shaken by both the lively nature of those gathered, as well as the post itself.
Instead of a hangman’s noose, there was instead a collection of dangled hooks held just above eye level. Arson was alarmed at his thoughts on what the hooks could be used for, until a young man with black hair down to his shoulders was dragged onto the stage the post was affixed too.
A cheer rose through the crowd, and the boy was lifted off his feet by two men. Moments before a third man drove the hooks into the sockets of the boys skull. Eyes, nose, ears and mouth, were all filled by the deadly instruments.
Arson took a step back to escape the sight. His throat and mouth filled with bile at the image that flared up in his mind of the boy when he closed his eyes. He had to take a deep breath and collect himself.
“Okay Arson, its time to put on your big boy pants, you have seen worse things… doesn’t matter that it was fake holo-cast violence and this is real…,” whispered Arson as he tried to comfort himself.
He dashed off ashamed of his weak stomach and jumped off the opposing side of the roof; while small and tiny runes lit the surface of his vest. He’d taken to only the use of runes and his runic constructs for the trials. As it added both a difficulty that Arson enjoyed, and forced him to familiarize himself with the language of magic far further than he would have been otherwise.
He floated to the ground. The air assisted in his descents safety and gravity eased to make the ten stories he fell feel more like a small leap.
He knew his body could fall that distance easily without harm, but Arson began to wonder about challenges where he would have to either jump from incredible heights, or be forced to fly once more. A feat he hadn’t quite figured out how to do with runes yet.
He thought about the potential for trials to restrict the use of skills altogether, and knew he would face that reality eventually. Thirteen runes stacked on top of each other three times above Arson’s head, and fused.
Three Living Hand constructs formed and landed on Arson. One on his left shoulder, he designated as his defensive hand. Another on his right, which held his offensive hand. The final on his back, his jack of all trades..
He’d worn his Living Hands in this manner since they’d been mistaken as armor in a previous trial. While the runes that he wore on his clothing were always seen as works of art and Arson still didn’t understand why.
The tapestry of magical art he wore shifted for his task. Often even further changed in the middle of trials when situations called for more specific runes. For the most part though, the trials fit into three basic categories.
Stealth, which he currently used. The runes that lined his body distorted his appearance. Blended him into the background, and made him nearly invisible in shaded areas.
Second was Combat, which Arson hadn’t developed as much as the other two rune sets he currently worked on. He could admit that he spent the most time thinking about possibilities for potential combat runes, but liked that the trials had been mostly puzzle-like in nature thus far.
Although he found that he favored the use of bows, shields, and scythes when he came across them, he decided to practice each specific weapon craft more thoroughly as time passed.
The last was his diplomatic set, which he hoped he wouldn’t be forced to use in this setting. With what he’d seen, these people's tastes weren’t to his liking and he hadn’t made habit of socializing with savage cultures at any point.
It took him three days of skulking around the castle and keep he’d been dropped into to find the princess he believed to be indicated in his prompt. The young woman spent most of her time in her library, and the only other places visited were the large kitchen, and training quarters which only left her bedroom and Arson didn’t dare keep track of her movements there. It was on his third day of shadowing her that a rune caught his interest.
The princess had as many as 27 or more books at a time, in the air around her. Each book like a moon caught in her orbit. A page turned with each rotation it made around her.
Most of the runes he’d seen or read about in the library he’d already added to his own growing library of runes, or had already claimed. So when his Overlay caught sight of unfamiliar characters and symbols, the book lit up in his vision.
Prior to that moment, he’d remained quiet and unmoved in the woman’s presence, but his thirst for knowledge took hold and before Arson knew it, he also paced a slow circle around the young woman to read the book as she did.
“You know at first when you began to follow me, I thought you were an assassin,” said the princess. Arson froze, and the woman chuckled softly. He nearly gave in to the sudden urge to steal the book and run, but then remembered the prompt.
“Then I realized you have read nearly all the books on runes in my father’s library and thought maybe, maybe you were just a foreign scion who lacked knowledge,” said the princess. Arson took in a rune that was a precursor to the opposition to gravity and smiled as the noble spoke on.
“Then you began to circle and again I thought you were an assassin for sure, but now I just think you maybe are some sort of rune collector?” Arson kneeled in front of the princess and shifted his runic set from stealth to that of diplomacy . These runes enhanced his voice, lit his features, and made the stars within his eyes hard to look away from.
“I am, Your Majesty. I apologize. It's just that the runes in that book seem to align with something I am trying to figure out which is honestly dear to me,” said Arson.
“I am not queen just yet, so please drop the titles, for now, you may call me Ezra.” The white haired princess never took off the mask of the dragon she wore, and this was the first time that he was able to take in her eyes. Her deep ruby red eyes.
“As you wish Ezra, I am Sovereign, but my friends call me Arson,” said Arson with a smile.
“Hmmm, Arson, I like that, do you know what it means?”
Arson shook his head before he responded, “Not truly, but I am apparently named after the first man to become king of all skies, something about burning down heaven to build paradise, was how my mother described it.”
He couldn’t give exact details about his family, as he knew that he could be in a realm that neighbored his own, where his parents were hated. He didn’t know what enemies his family name alone could bring, and didn’t want to temp fate by using it inappropriately.
Another possibility of many was that he was in a time that directly linked to his own, and his actions and words carried weight. Weight that could change his own life and memories, or even more drastically, the realm's as a whole.
He only wished that he’d had that realization before he’d helped finish build that solar energy refinery in the desert. The people were geniuses, and even Arson felt dumb in their presence as he worked with them, and all he’d shown them was what materials would offer better efficiency.
They hadn’t believed him at first, but with time he was able to prove himself, even without the use of runes. He in fact only learned one rune from the entire trial, and it was the rune for solar energy inscribed onto the structures golden apex.
“So do you normally follow princesses around, child, or is there something you need from me?”
Arson snapped out of his thoughts and back to the situation at hand. He looked the young woman in the eyes and nodded.
“Yes, I need to know how to keep your heart pure in a place like this, ruling in a place like this,” said Arson honestly, with a gesture out the window toward the crowd of people. The same crowd of people that had hung nobles and slaves alike for days straight.
“I don’t know…,” said Ezra with a sigh. Tears began to roll free down the surface of her mask and Arson looked away, somehow ashamed of himself.
“Please, don’t mind my tears, child, they are always just below the surface, at the thought of my lost love, the thought of our children never experiencing their father’s glory, the thought of how my kingdom celebrates a monarch's rise to power, all of it,” said Ezra with a sweep of her arm before the limb fell limp at her side.
“You could make a change,” said Arson.
The two spent the next few days in the middle of a wager. The two would go back and forth. One produced a rune and the other had to be able to reproduce or learn the rune within a breath of the rune's appearance.
The wager was that Arson would beat her before the end of the 21 days of murder called the Kings & Queens Ceremony that preceded Ezra’s rise to the throne. They were seven days in and Arson noticed she’d begun to slow down drastically in the runes she knew and could produce.
They gave each other enough time to think, and make sure it wasn’t a rune they’d already used previously. And their once rapid pace, had dwindled down from 100 a day, to 50. He even wondered if the princess had begun to practice runes more directly in the privacy of her room at night.
He also took time to train with her men, and test many runic combinations Ezra knew since she’d been a child. She herself loved Arson’s Living Hands, and wondered why the boy didn’t believe they were completed.
In between that and Arson learning how to cook with runes from a woman who looked identical to Momma Almarine in the kitchen, he had long philosophical debates with the princess who was more shocked at Arson’s beliefs than anyone Arson had met prior.
“Have you decided yet?”
The princess looked over at Arson and frowned. Still she gave him a nod as tears filled her eyes once more.
“How did you know?” asked the princess. Arson wanted to tell her he knew because the last rune she’d shown him had glowed golden in his vision, which normally indicated everything he could do here had been done, or that the sound of a loud turbine grew in his inner ear. They’d grown close over their days of endless competition, and Arson had seen a change in her entire mood from both their exchanges and the violence that surrounded her.
“Because it seems you couldn’t bare this any longer,” said Arson with a pleasant smile.
“But I do not want you to leave, child. Stay and be one of my advisors. You will be needed in the time to come,” said Ezra. Arson’s smile grew wider at those words and he too shed tears as he spoke.
“No, princess Ezra. I am not that catalyst, but you are.”
101% completion bonus achieved. Fate structure adjusted. Bonuses distributed.
As Arson predicted, he was temporarily forbidden from that point on in the trials to use skills given by the system and his ancestors through his Overlay which only further focused his studies, and before he knew it, a day had passed back home, and Arson was a year older.
“I guess I’ll put that part of my training in the background for now, not like there aren’t enough runes for me to learn while here,” said Arson with a nod to himself. He just hoped he was moving fast enough to make his four day time limit.
“Nothing to fear but fear itself, guess I better get back to it…”
…
“So he’s inside a dungeon, kinda…, that is beyond vague,” said Xani. Troy nodded but shrugged in a way that made light of the situation.
“Why aren’t you freaking the sparks out?”
“Hey now, you don’t have to yell at me, I am worried about the kid too, but Jade is acting like this was supposed to sparking happen or something, just not so soon, when he was much older maybe, I don’t know!”
“Okay, so what happens to all of us if he doesn’t come back? Have you thought that far, he’s a seven season cycle old kid, trapped in a dungeon… kinda. Should we not all be worried about the BHC, and Arson’s plans for the dump and Junkyard?”
“What do you mean?" asked Troy as she came to her feet alarmed as her thoughts spun.
“I mean our boss is a kid. Yeah, but he is beyond brilliant, like scarily so sometimes, and you're telling me he could come back to us having had ruined his plans by making the wrong move? Jade thinks he’ll be gone for a season, and that’s if he survives, she can’t even chase after him because the plane he went to is so large, I can only imagine how he will be after he comes back, the kid grows up quick and his feelings for us could change, I don’t know what if he kills us and replaces us all for stronger scions or something,” said Xani. Troy stopped pacing in her room and looked at Xani. Did she look anxious?
“Wait, are you really worried about that kind of stuff, you know Arson would never do that, right?”
“No I don’t, Troy. I know what Arson was like at the orphanage, but since he’s formed his core, he hasn’t built a thing, only destroyed anything that gets in his way, I remember when he would steal broken tech just to fix it and return it. Where is that kid, Troy?”
Troy didn’t have the answer to that question. She’d only met Arson a couple seasons ago. She may have seen him around the orphanage or heard the rare rumor, but that was it. This Arson was the only Arson she knew, he was excited and ready to explore at all times.
No more, no less…
“I don’t think Jade would...” started Troy.
“Don’t tell me you are brainwashed like the rest of the orphans just because our quality of living has risen slightly, even Arson still has his guard up around Jade, the woman is a realm consumer, only growing in strength by killing the entire existences of individuals as powerful as her, after she slays them in battle and his dad may be even worse, he doesn’t kill by the trillion as Jade has, but he’s subjugated nearly a sextillion lives across the realms he’s seen as a divinity in,” said Xani.
“What does that have to do with Arson being our friend?” Troy was confused by Xani’s rambling, and didn’t want to miss her point.
“He’s their son, Troy, born from one, and adopted by another, he comes from old blood, powerful magic, and an unyielding dominance. Not for friend, nor family, only ascension above all things, we all must remain useful to Arson, trust me, alive or dead, we have to honor his name, or we will be demoted, cast aside completely, or killed outright.”
Troy felt herself nod at Xani’s words. Something about what she’d said resonated with Troy down to her core. She felt that Arson deserved that from her, as it was what she felt he’d already done for them in the short time they’d been best friends.
“So then it seems we have work to do…,” said Troy as she looked Xani in the eyes.
“Get everyone together, it’s time for dinner, we have to create a solid plan for our next moves,” said Troy, in an attempt to invoke her best impression of Arson. To Troy’s benefit, it worked and Xani responded positively, just before they moved to leave.
“Yes ma’am, and hey Troy,” said Xani. Troy looked back to her friend from her doorway.
“Thanks for letting me freak out, I normally don’t have anyone to talk to but the kid and Jasmine, and I love her, but she only takes fashion seriously, so I appreciate you not making my worries seem small,” said Xani. Troy smiled wide and gave a nod.
“You're welcome. Now let’s go, I’m hungry!”