Jonathan got to his feet, and walked around the glowing rune, feeling a subtle sense of dread just by looking at the thing. It was even more imposing than before, and his metaphysical senses were shaking in terror of it. Instead of retreating, he smiled. This would be a new and powerful addition to his arsenal. The only thing he had to do now was to find a test subject, willing or otherwise.

Leaving the rune and his rucksack behind, Jonathan ran out into the Ash Heaps, and quickly found a likely target. A lone Ash Prowler slunk between the ruins, clearly malnourished. Its bones were poking out from beneath its skin, and its face was gaunt and haggard. When it spotted Jonathan, it bayed in desperate rage and started looking towards him.

Jonathan smiled at the approaching Ash Prowler and started running back towards his hiding place, at a rate that the beast could catch up. Far from the days that one of those beasts would have been able to chase him down with ease, now he was the one who had to regulate his speed for it to catch up. A few minutes later, the beast began to flag, the exertion too much for its weakened form. Jonathan waited patiently, as there were no more monsters around for him to use the rune on. This was the only one nearby that suited his testing parameters.

It recovered its stamina soon enough, and it followed him the rest of the way to the site of his rune. Jonathan sat down next to the glowing mark on the ground, and waited for the monster to come. As soon as it came within range, it leaped at him, claws and jaws extended to their fullest. He rolled to the side, and the monster landed on the rune. An explosion of red light blinded Jonathan for a moment, and when it cleared, all that was left of the Prowler was a skeleton, without a scrap of skin left. Ash drifted from the air to the floor, which was a fitting end for the creature.

The results were far more than anything Jonathan had been expecting, and he realized that he was receiving a passive buff to his abilities simply by virtue of having ranked up, never mind the skill. That was just icing on the cake. The rune itself was still the same, but it seemed tidier and more exact, more aligned with the actual concept of Hatred. Would he be able to eventually make a perfect rendition of the concept? If he was able to do that, he sensed that he would be able to channel power beyond anything he had ever seen or heard of.

Creating that rune, which Jonathan was sure would have prompted a level up of his runecrafting abilities, or even several, prior to reaching Student Rank, did not even contribute to a single increase. Still, the heightened power was a boon in and of itself, meaning that Jonathan was glad of his new power. Even better, he had gained full credit for the killing of the monster, which sparked an idea in his mind.

Over the course of the next few hours, Jonathan worked on creating a complex trap in the middle of the desert. Utilizing his enhanced capabilities to their maximum, he dug a pit deep into the ash, using his gauntlets to fracture any rocks that got in his way. By the time he was finished, he was greeted with a ten foot deep by twenty foot wide hole in the ground.

He jumped down into the hole, and began to fuse the sides together with his mana, turning it into a glassy rock like substance. This quickly bottomed out his mana, and he experienced a feeling that he never wanted to feel again. Upon reaching zero, a spike of pain was driven through his head, along with a sudden surge of intense nausea. It dissipated over a few moments, but the memory was sufficient for an age. The mana recovered quickly enough, and he soon forced the memory out of his mind for the time being. He could not let fear of that happening again distract him from his purpose here.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Eventually the walls were entirely smooth, and he leaped out, grabbing onto the top of the hole and levering himself upwards. All around the trap, he created runes, imbuing them with his Divinity as quickly as he could. He had to wait for it to refill, but eventually he had about twenty runes surrounding the pit. Finally, he created sloped ramps on the side of the pit from his mana and bit more of the ash. Hopefully this would cause the corpses of the monster he found to slide down into the pit, and it would also make it so that after a rune was exhausted, a monster could still be forced into the pit, where it would become easy prey for him. Not that they weren’t already, but he still had his limits, and if he had to fight, say, a dozen Ash Prowlers, he would prefer for them to be in a place away from him. Perhaps he could even use them as a means to work towards creating a ranged skill. He did not want to have to solely rely on his martial abilities, however effective they were.

He finally finished up, just as the sun was starting to go down, which was perfect for his needs. It would conceal the pit, and the light of the runes would make it impossible to see in any case. He suspected that strange lights were not an uncommon occurrence in this world, and he assumed that it would be less of a deterrent than the pit. However, he tried to cover one of them up with ash, just in case. The ash blew off the rune as if under the influence of a strong wind, and he quickly learned that it was impossible to hide the rune fully. Even when he placed a large slab of stone over the rune, the light somehow shone through. He suspected that there was a way to hide them, but he didn’t have the patience or the time to look for such a thing. Instead, he surveyed his handiwork, and ran out into the night.

Using his mana as a light to see by, he quickly scouted the area for targets. Two troops of Ash Prowlers were within the immediate vicinity, of about a mile, and he quickly made himself known to them by darting in and punching the weakest members of the groups. Howling, the packs followed him, which was perfect. As he dashed across the stygian darkness of the ash, with his mana the only light in the gloom, he smiled, feeling alive.

As the howls and cries of the Prowlers behind him echoed over the wastes, he could only think of the influx of essence that he would be receiving soon. A few minutes later, he was back at the pit, the monsters following eagerly behind him. As soon as he reached it, he leaped over the hole in the ground, the runes unable to hurt him as he had created them. The Ash Prowlers on the other hand however…

Explosions of red light broke through the darkness behind him, and pained cries quickly faded into nothingness. A series of high pitched baying noises came from it, and Jonathan doubled around to see that his trap had worked spectacularly. Out of the twenty odd monsters that had chased him, barely a quarter of them were still alive, and they were trapped in the pit. Jonathan made his way over to the pit, and realized that he had nothing to fear from the few stragglers that were left behind. Most of them were injured from the sudden drop and the backlash from the runes, meaning that they would be easy prey. Dropping down among them, Jonathan quickly butchered the monsters with swings of his gauntlets, briefly lighting up the pit every time he used his mana abilities. Barely a minute later, the battle was over, and a rush of essence entered him.

You have killed an Ash Prowler!(x20)

You have leveled up!