Somewhat confused by the withdrawal of the circle lord, Jonathan continued to fight, but he could see that this battle was nothing more than a mop up at this point. Nobody was left alive who could hope to match him, or even his army.

The battle concluded in short order, if it could even be called such. Jonathan’s fist tore through the firmament, and sent a wave of all consuming energy through the air that destroyed the last few hundred fighters, left to die against the superior might of their foes. Had they not been the minions of a tyrannical being that would burn this entire world to grow stronger, then Jonathan might have felt a bit of pity for them. As it was, none was forthcoming.

Edgar and Hushar approached a moment later, from their own parts of the battlefield. They had destroyed the centipede monster, and all that was left of it now was a pile of diced insectile body parts.

“This lack of resistance is starting to worry me,” Edgar declared. “It’s as if Slothari is simply throwing her captains at us one by one like a petulant child tossing their toys aside in a fit of rage.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I just happened to meet a certain circle lord a few minutes ago,” Jonathan replied. “Slothari had sent one of her vessels here to get a better look at my strength. I’m not sure how much power she was holding back.”

“It can’t have been too much, though, if you beat her without much injury, then she must have been a considerable distance from her true strength. You have grown considerably stronger since Granath, but Slothari is still stronger.”

Jonathan grinned. “She won’t be for long. I’ve been neglecting a key part of my powerset for too long. It’s about time I get back to runecrafting.”

With this proclamation, Jonathan set the tone for the new few days of travel. As they went, their progress slowed to a crawl, stymied by increasing waves of hostile fighters. Slothari had personally witnessed Jonathan’s power, and seemed to be taking him far more seriously now. Her strategy was a bit strange though. It almost seemed like she was feeding him levels, rather than simply showing up and fighting in her true form.

It was similar to Angranor’s granting of the Tartarus token to Jonathan, almost as if the beings that had ruled the Hells for most of history were stagnating and fed up with a life of boredom. Jonathan couldn’t understand what looked like a foolish maneuver, but who knew how one’s mind changed as the weight of millenia pressed down?

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As the army went, traversing the gnarled snags and long dead trees, Jonathan honed his two energy based Pathway skills, recently neglected in favor of his Blunt Weapon Mastery. At his level of mastery, each rank took a considerable investment of time. However, it was high time he added to his runic arsenal.

Every day he set aside a few hours to tinker with his skills, finding that he had a whole host of insights saved up from working with his runes. In fact, he could almost feel a desire from his Rune of Hatred and Rune of Beckoning to upgrade. He had used them so long that they had begun to eclipse the conceptual meanings of their base states. Hatred and Beckoning were powerful enough concepts, at least at his level, but they were at the very bottom rung of the runic ladder.

The whole system reminded Jonathan of an archetype in some of the books he had read on Earth, where one could commune with the primal forces of nature, which were invariably called the Dao, or Laws, or something similar to that. In those stories, people could upgrade their connections, climbing the ladder from lower concepts to the very pinnacle. Sometimes, they never seemed to get there because of the sheer length of those series.

Before leaving Earth, Jonathan had devoured an especially satisfying collection of books, over ten in length, about a man dealing with the arrival of the System to Earth itself. He had connected to the Dao, but his progression rate had been frustratingly slow at times. By the end of the tenth book, he had barely been lifted out of the shoals of true power.

Jonathan sometimes sent his enhanced mind harkening back to the pleasures of his old world, but often he found that they simply made him sad. He could have written out many of the books he had read in their entirety, but there was no point. He had already read them. All that would achieve was generating a sense of homesickness in him that he really did not care for in the situation that he was in. Even if he could return to Earth, he would never be the same person again. How could he hope to coexist with the largely peaceful populace of that planet when he had the blood of entire races and legions upon his hands? He was a butcher such as had never been seen through the long and brutal history of his homeworld.

It took him a few days to eke out a greater connection with his runes, but eventually, he started to gather the insights necessary to upgrade them. He was hovering on the brink of Expert Rank with both of his energy Pathway skills, with Energy Manipulation being slightly closer.

Working his runes daily allowed him to close the gap between them. Both now stood at Journeyman 9, a mere step away from the vaunted status of Expert.