Noah pored over his grimoire. He had absolutely no idea how long Zath would be distracted outside, and he couldn’t afford to waste a single second. Fog still clouded his mind from his death, but even if he couldn’t actually make the Rank 4 Mind Rune yet, he could still figure out the exact strategy he could follow and then take care of the actual creation when he got access to his mind back.
The entire idea of a Mind Rune was still repulsive to him. Everything about the way Wizen’s magic worked made Noah wish the man had never existed. From what he’d done to Alexandra to his involvement with the events that had brought Noah, Lee, and Moxie to the Damned Plains, it seemed that every single action that Wizen took was vile.
But going up against a Mind Rune user without a way to deal with their runes was just too dangerous, especially after Noah had seen how strong Wizen was the last time they’d met.
It wasn’t even just about protecting his mind from Wizen. From what he knew, Mind Runes generally couldn’t just wrest control of someone’s body instantly. Wizen had needed time to completely take control of Alexandra’s body.
In addition to a way to protect himself if Wizen did have a method to quickly take over his body, Noah also needed one to sever the man’s connection to any of the people he’d controlled — and the best way to do that was probably fighting with fire.
Unfortunately, that left him with no choice. He needed a Mind Rune if he wanted to maximize his chances of coming out ahead against Wizen. And if he wanted it to fit into his other Runes and not be a wasted effort, it had to be related to a disaster.
The mere idea for the concept was already frustrating. Disasters were mass-scale events, while almost everything he initially came up with relation to a rune was focused on a single person.
That wasn’t even to mention the fact that just about every concept that Noah could come up with for a Mind Rune made him want to throw up. The exact purpose of a rune had an immense effect on what its actual abilities would be — and he really didn’t want to be running around with a Dementia Rune.
He knew he was going to use something related to the line. It was the area that he had the most experience in — but he wasn’t about to start destroying people’s minds with thousands of years’ worth of rot, if such a thing could even be manifested into a Rank 4 Rune.
There had to be a way he could get what he needed as something disaster-adjacent without committing a slew of war crimes that hadn’t been invented yet.
Time slipped by as he thought. Zath’s distraction, which Noah had expected to be measured minutes at the best, stretched into hours. That somehow managed to make things even more difficult. The longer that Zath remained outside speaking with an invisible, completely intangible entity, the more concerned with the situation Noah got.
This wasn’t just some incident of a powerful person being mildly off their rocker. Every single Rank 6 that Noah had met, much less Rank 7, had been borderline insane. In Jalen’s case, he’d just been straight up insane. But their insanity was a haze through which they saw the world. The damage of years on the psyche when it was forced to witness aspects of humanity’s worst on repeat.
It was the type of damage that made someone think that getting mouthed off to by someone they were about to kill was funny and entertaining. It was not the type of insanity that made someone sit and talk to something that did not exist for hours on end.
And that could mean only one thing.
The entity to which Zath was talking existed.
Not only did it exist, but it was sapient. Something that Noah could not see, hear, touch, or otherwise make out, had been traveling with him and was somehow tied to the book that laid on the table before him.
Calling the situation unnerving would have been an understatement. Part of Noah wanted to pelt the grimoire into a fire just to see what would happen, but he couldn’t indulge his confusion or fears. He had too much at stake.
Even if he’d been traveling with the incarnation of evil itself, Noah needed the time. Every minute that passed was a minute that brought him closer to being able to use his magic and form a new Rank 4 Rune.
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And so he did the favorite activity of every politician, king, and other official that had ever taken any form of power. He entirely ignored the problem to focus on his own gains and hoped that nothing would go drastically wrong as a result of it.
First, Noah worked on expanding his idea of what possible disasters could actually be made with a Mind Rune. Hysteria came to mind. It would work — but it definitely felt like it was crossing the boundaries of what kind of magic he actually wanted to be casting. There was a difference between killing and ripping someone’s mind from them.
A more promising idea followed a few minutes later. Boundless Devotion — or something along those lines. Calling it a disaster was a bit of a stretch, but people could do some nasty things when they completely followed something without ever questioning it in the slightest. That was how charismatic school board leaders who cut funding from everything other than the sports teams got chosen as —
Damn it. Getting off track, here.
Boundless Devotion was still questionable in morality, but it felt a little bit less… evil than sone of the alternatives. Drawing power from people’s belief in him sounded promising. It wasn’t completely evil, and it wouldn’t involve forcing anyone to do anything.
There were just two problems with the idea.
The first was that Noah didn’t actually have that many people that believed in his strength. Even if he counted everyone that had ever heard of and feared Spider, the rune probably wouldn’t be able to gather any truly significant strength from a few hundred demons and a dozen or so humans.
Perhaps that could have been something he could have worked around if it weren’t for a slightly more significant issue.
There was absolutely no way a Rank 4 rune would be strong enough to draw power from other people’s devotion. Not only did it feel like far too powerful of a concept for a Rank 4, but it was also just completely impossible by the restrictions of Runes themselves.
Rank 4 unlocked a magical domain — a zone that increased perception and allowed him to snuff out other, weaker magic.
Rank 5 allowed him to manifest his magic within that domain from pure energy, rather than having to use something that already existed in world around him.
Rank 6… well, Noah wasn’t entirely sure what Rank 6 actually did. He’d never had a chance to really grill Jalen on it. When he made it out of the Damned Plains, it would go up in his priority list.
Either way, it didn’t matter. Drawing on devotion would only work if people were within the range of his rune, which definitely wouldn’t be much farther than his domain. Maybe it would become possible at Rank 5 or 6, but it just wasn’t realistic yet.
And so his search continued.
Ideas came and went. Noah came up with constituent Runes such as Mental Barrier for Rank 2 and Strong Will for Rank 3, but his real goal was a Rank 4 Rune that could actually work as a disaster.
His frustration steadily built. Making any form of disaster based on Mind Runes was like trying to make a toy from pipe bombs. There was a chance it could look good from the outside, but it would probably blow up the moment someone touched it.
Hours continued to slip by. The fog in his mind peeled back like the skin of an orange if it had been stuffed into the hands of an unruly child. Namely, it came away in uneven chunks and pieces.
And as the fog went, Noah’s thoughts grew sharper. His ideas became better — closer to what he needed. Closer to something that would let him go to sleep at night without feeling like he’d become Wizen in the pursuit of defeating him.
And then the fog was gone.
Control of his mind returned to him in its entirety. Noah felt the moment as if a jolt of lightning had struck his chest. Rivers of electricity coursed out from his heart and ripped into his limbs in a split second. He leapt, tripping over his own legs, and fell out of the bed face-first.
Noah’s body sprung into motion. He caught himself, vaulting off his hands and landing easily on his feet. Moxie stared at him from where she sat on her chair, the formerly bored expression on her face evaporating in a mixture of amusement and concern.
“Getting some exercise in after sitting for too long?”
“My power is back,” Noah said, looking down at his hands. The Rune of Self had re-activated. He’d almost forgotten just how intense the rune was. Every single part of his body was his once more.
And every part included his mind. Moxie said something else, but Noah didn’t hear it. The thoughts that had been floating around in his addled skull finally clicked. They snapped together and finished the puzzle that he’d been unknowingly working on.
He knew what kind of Rune he could make. One that would let him fight back against Wizen. One that would let him keep who he was.
It was a concept that he was familiar with.
Very familiar with.
A smile pulled across Noah’s lips.
“Sorry, Moxie,” he said. “I zoned out for a moment.”
“It’s fine. You’ve got a… look on your face.”
Noah wasn’t surprised. He’d finished the hard part. The rune may as well have already been there in his mind, waiting in anticipation of for its own creation.
All he had to do was make it before Zath remembered the reason why he’d sought Noah out in the first place.