The previous yelling outside had shifted from confusion and anger into something far more terrified. The barking dogs sounded much more frantic as well. Lee had a moment to consider the message about Caffeine and wonder what Stanley was doing... Then the building shook violently, almost throwing him to the floor as he scrambled off the couch, and another horrific scream reached his ears before cutting off far too abruptly.
The sound of breaking glass followed from somewhere below, and it drew Lee's eyes to the large sliding glass door of his porch. He was moving before the conscious decision to do so had fully registered in his brain and stopped with a finger touching the glass.
Knowledge that hadn't been in his head an hour ago led him to pull at the pool of power inside himself, and Lee's finger slid across the glass, leaving behind a brilliant blue line. He drew out a strange but now familiar symbol onto the glass as power flowed through him and spread out from where he touched.
Lee could feel it spreading through the glass, reaching all the way to the frame around the edge and then circling back. He knew exactly how much power the glass could take without breaking. He didn't know how he knew that, but he did, and that knowledge informed the skill he was using without requiring him to think about it.
A moment later, it was done.
Skill Level Up: [Rune Scribe]
The blinding light of his first rune faded into invisibility, but Lee knew the window was now one of the strongest barriers in the world.
More screams came from outside and another building shaking crash rolled through the floor.
Lee stopped thinking and let the new class knowledge guide his actions as he went from window to window throughout his apartment. His breath was fast, and his pulse thundered in his ears as he vacillated between the terror of what sounded like people dying outside and the wonder of the magic he was doing with such ease.
Heavy impacts periodically shook the building, and strange noises that sounded almost familiar assaulted his ears. Like a kind of deep croaking...
After the windows on either side of it, Lee put the same symbol on his front door. The particle-board mash of wood pieces reacted differently to the magic, both requiring more power and also providing less total empowerment, which didn't matter because the door was already more durable than a piece of glass.
The footsteps slapping against the cement as they raced past just outside turned into a scream as something hit the building again. Then the scream cut off... right as a loud impact struck his newly enchanted door.
Lee flinched back in heart-pounding panic... but the door held. However, the jam around the door groaned, and Lee could have sworn he heard something cracking.
He put his trembling hand against the wall then, mana at his fingertips, ready to enchant it as he had everything else, and found... a problem.
The cinder blocks making up the walls had a similar property to the door in that they were many individual pieces held together by glue, or in this case, mortar. Just like the door, it wasn't really a problem to lump them all together, but Lee could feel the power reaching further and further as it tried to find the edges of the greater whole.
He tried to limit it, tried to contain the power directly around his own little apartment, but the rune couldn't seem to find an acceptable cut-off anywhere as it followed the walls all the way around the entire third floor he was on.
Then it clicked, and power roared through him.
It felt like his finger was dragging a thousand-pound weight as Lee forced it to move while simultaneously trying not to scream from the liquid fire flowing through his veins. He feared his finger, his hand, even his entire arm might melt right off, but also knew that it wouldn't... probably.
The process seemed to take an eternity, but was over in seconds as every wall around him flashed with a blinding pulse of blue light before fading back to darkness.
Skill Level Up: [Rune Scribe]
Lee felt drained, achy, and strangely exhilarated as he tried to blink away the spots in his vision. His rune had worked, and while he hadn't been able to limit it to only his apartment, the magic had focused mostly nearby. It still spread out across the building, but he knew that the effect would diminish the further away from the origin. The important part was that he would be safe here.
Then another impact sent him stumbling, which ended with him on the floor. The still unenchanted floor...
His hand was shaking, and Lee hesitated at the pain he knew would come as he prepared to put a rune onto the floor. It was going to take the entire third floor. He knew it would... but did it anyway.
Or rather, he tried.
Lee barely started before it became immediately apparent what the problem was; he was out of Mana. It was refilling, he could practically see the Mana flowing in from every direction, could feel it rushing into him like a firehose, but it was a hose trying to fill a lake. Far too slow for what he needed...
The Well!
He scrambled on hands and knees toward the Well, not trusting his legs at the moment. The flow increased as he approached, but it was still too slow. Lee lifted his left hand, his right still feeling numb and hot. The flow of Mana kept increasing as he approached until, abruptly, it rushed in. He was full again in seconds.
Lee dropped both hands on the floor, feeling much better with his Mana restored but still afraid of the pain he knew was in his immediate future... then he started drawing on the conveniently bare patch of cement where he'd ripped up the carpet by accident what felt like a lifetime ago.
Unfortunately, the magic knowledge in his head didn't make him ambidextrous but told him he really didn't want to screw up the Rune by trying to draw it with his left hand. So he used his right again.
As expected, the Rune insisted on taking the entire third floor... floor, but like the last one, Lee knew it wouldn't hold up nearly as well on the other side of the building.
Due to having done it once already and the smaller total area, Lee pulled it off without too much extra pain. His eyes naturally drifted to the ceiling after that, and he was glad he didn't have a ladder to reach it... though he could climb on the kitchen counter...
The screams, yells, and dull thuds continued in a sporadic yet unceasing racket beyond his walls. The impacts against the building felt less impactful thanks to the runes already placed, but each hit also drained a bit of power from those same runes as they blocked damage to the structure.
Lee topped his Mana back up, his completely numb right arm granting him relief from the burning sensation and also an excuse to hold off on the ceiling since he found the limb slightly sluggish.
In a compromise between cowering in a corner and boldly going to save his neighbors, Lee finally peeked back out a front window to see just what the hell was going on. The blinding glow of his Runes had prevented him from seeing anything earlier while enchanting those same windows... and it was still pitch black outside.
I need a light... His gaze flickered around the chaotic and disorganized darkened mess of his apartment until he caught a flash of white in the dimness. There!
The plate was ceramic, which his knowledge told him was durable enough for what he wanted, and his left-hand finger drew a much simpler symbol on the plain white disc. The Mana cost was also negligible compared to the last, barely draining enough to notice.
The bright blue light shining out of the symbol remained once finished this time, and he angled it away from his face and toward the front door.
Pressing it against the windows didn't help because the double-paned window still reflected too much light back inside, which made Lee also realize that he'd only enchanted the inside pane on every one of his windows...
The face looming into the glare from outside scared the shit out of Lee, and he fell onto his ass as he scrambled away from the window, dropping the plate in the process. It landed face down on the carpet, unbroken but plunging his apartment back into darkness.
Something shook the building again, and a yellow light flashed outside as a man's shout echoed through the walls. It wasn't a cry of pain, though, more a yell of defiance...
Footsteps vibrated softly through to where Lee sat, and the yellow light moved past his door to the window on the other side.
"¡María, vuelve adentro!" A man's voice yelled something in Spanish, and Lee heard a woman say something back but didn't understand any of it.
Then something pounded on his door, and Lee flinched.
"Mister!" the man yelled, "can you help? We have injured people out here!"
Help? Lee didn't even know what was out there, and judging by how the damn building kept shaking, he really didn't want to know.
A metallic clang sounded, along with another flash of yellow light, and the man grunted.
Lee forced himself to move and snatched up his plate-light. Squeezing his eyes shut against the glare, he opened the front door and slid the plate across the floor, glowing side up, before slamming the door behind it.
Looking back out the window was... illuminating, and Lee was very glad he hadn't been dumb enough to run out there because a giant frog was crawling along the balcony that circled the interior courtyard of the building.
Its mouth opened, and a tongue shot past the window, clanging against a yellow glow.
Inside the yellow glow... was a pot lid. A pot lid held by a man, and presumably the one who was calling him before. The same man stepped forward toward the five-foot-tall frog, his glowing lid held up as a shield while his other hand brandished a machete.
The frog shifted at his approach and shot out the tongue again. It ricocheted from the shield, and the man lunged forward immediately, swinging down with his blade at the monstrous amphibian.
It croaked when the blade sliced a deep cut into its lips and then jumped. Unfortunately for the man, it jumped forward and body slammed him. He flew all the way past Lee's door again before disappearing out of sight; the frog following him into the dark while a woman screamed something in Spanish.
Another man ran into Lee's light from the other direction and picked up the plate. Hey, that's mine!
The blue light was shining up at the man's upper body, so Lee saw clearly when a wet tendril of something smacked into the side of his chest. Lee watched that wide-eyed face as it sailed over the railing and kept going back.
The blue light illuminated a massive frog clinging to the far side of the courtyard. Only for an instant, though. Then its maw closed around both the man and the glowing plate in his hands.
Darkness descended as Lee stared in disbelief. What the fuck was that!? Where the light had vanished was now only a dull orange glow... A moment later, he felt something break. The orange glow vanished, and then a trickle of power flowed into him from the same direction.
Lee instinctively understood that his rune had just been destroyed, or rather the plate had been, and the rune couldn't exist without it.
I need a weapon... Lee moved back from the window slowly as if trying to sneak away without drawing that thing's attention... He was mostly sure that his window would hold up, mostly.
He thought about the blast he'd spent all day learning to control... and shook his head. Yeah, it was powerful, but Lee had used only drops of mana for that power. Compared to the ocean of mana inside him now... he didn't know what would happen. Especially since he'd never figured out how to release anything less than all of his mana at once... Last resort, Lee told himself. That is a last resort. Like if I get eaten by a huge frog...
His eyes found the ripped-up box he'd pulled the plate from just as something crashed on a lower floor. It sounded like a wall breaking...
Kitchen knife, butcher knife, anything! Lee upended the box and found... silverware. Nothing sharper than a fork or butter knife...
New class knowledge pinged off the idea of sharpness, and Lee snatched up a handful of the utensils. His right arm was no longer numb, though it was full of pins and needles. Still, he could move it, and move he did, drawing out a tiny symbol on the widest part of a fork.
The mana cost was negligible on this small rune, but the fork bit him as soon as the rune was complete, and Lee dropped it in surprise!
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
Debuff: [Minor Bleeding]
Lee sucked his stinging hand and tasted blood... The fork was indeed sharp now, but he realized he had made the entire thing sharp. The flat sides of it would be safe, but every edge, every pointy tine was now razor sharp.
Lee dove into his Rune knowledge and knew he could do a more careful application that would focus the sharpness more intentionally...
Another crash of breaking glass, this time sounding out next door as both a man and a woman yelled, followed by small children screaming in terror... Shit! He didn't have time to be fancy.
Lee scribbled Rune after Rune on his pile of silverware, tossing each toward the door where they bounced off with sparks of light and a metallic ping that he knew was the enchanted door defending itself from his enchanted forks... His fingers had no such enchantment, and he paid for it a few more times.
The last one he turned into another light. A much more durable light than his plate.
That was enough, right? He could provide some weapons at least... but he couldn't go out into that shit show, right?
Something heavy thumped right outside his door, and Lee heard more screams as he peeked out the window. A giant frog was right outside... It shot its tongue out and clanged off the pot-lid shield again.
Now! Lee pulled the door open and threw the entire bloody handful of enchanted utensils through the opening, right at the frog.
It hopped completely clear of his projectiles... right as a massive tongue punched through the metal railing outside his door and snatched the glittering cloud of falling silverware before slamming into his door.
The door responded to the impact by slamming into Lee's head and tossing him backward with a flash of light and pain behind his eyes. He was still falling when he saw the tongue retracting into that same maw across the courtyard, his glowing fork stuck to it along with the other enchanted silverware. Lee hit the floor as the glowing fork vanished inside the frog, and then his wonderfully spring-loaded door swung itself shut with a satisfying thud.
The horrible croaking that followed the snuffing of the light made the entire building vibrate, and Lee grinned despite his fear. That idiot frog couldn't have done a better job if he'd planned it! Except maybe not getting hit with his own door...
Debuff Removed: [Minor Bleeding]
He gingerly touched his forehead, feeling for any growing lumps, and found a gash that noticeably shrank under his fingers... and then it was gone. His fingers didn't hurt anymore, either. All the little cuts had vanished. He wasn't sure why he seemed to be healing so fast, but he wasn't going to complain, either.
Debuff: [Hungry]
The loud croaking turned wet as Lee made it back to the door and put one eye to his peephole, trying to see what was happening outside. He wasn't about to trust the windows after seeing that tongue go through the metal so easily, even if he knew logically that his windows were stronger than metal now... or they should be...
A light appeared across the courtyard, falling down in a glittering mess of dark liquid and silverware from a giant frog's open maw. The fork disappeared from sight, but light still shone up from below and illuminated the frog clinging to the interior side of the building as something dripped from a dozen holes in its huge body.
Lee really hoped it was blood.
The mouth opened as the frog looked his way... and something shot out directly into his door.
Lee fell back onto his butt in an instinctive flinch as something went splat against the door with a wet thud. Only this time, the door had nothing to do with his fall.
He was up a moment later and peering back through the peephole, only now it was smudgy and dark...
Moving over and peeking through a corner of the windows let him see the twitching tongue on the balcony in front of his door. The severed, minced and bloody, six-foot-long piece of tongue... Ew.
The frog across the way was still dripping profusely, and as he watched, it sagged and then fell down into the courtyard, out of sight.
Lee wanted to cheer at his victory... but he could still see that man being swallowed in one bite. Only luck had prevented that from being him...
So instead, he snatched up another butter knife in blood-slicked and shaking hands. Then he had to wipe his hands and the knife off on his pants before he could hold it steady.
He started drawing his first double Rune while the building still shook around him, and people continued to cry out in the distance. This wasn't over.
A faint memory popped up in his mind. A memory of hearing a chorus of croaking frogs the few times he'd stepped out onto the porch the evening before. Hell, that five-foot-tall frog fighting his neighbor might be the smallest one. There could be hundreds or thousands of giant man-swallowing frogs surrounding him right now...
Lee's imagination did his shaking hands no favors, and it forced him to start over multiple times before he finally stuck a Rune, or rather two of them, onto the knife. Each fuckup required him to pull the Mana back through his arm, increasing the burning numbness, but luckily, it couldn't compare with what he'd needed for the walls and floors. He also still had to focus his mind on exactly what he wanted each Rune to do, and he fucked it up completely.
Debuff: [Minor Bleeding]
The hot sting in his hand when he grabbed the handle drew more blood, but the blade end wasn't sharp... Lee grabbed the dull blade and went back to his windows in time to see the neighbor with the machete deflect another tongue before chopping the blade into the frog's head.
It worked this time, and the frog collapsed beneath the blow.
Lee saw no more frogs in sight and cracked his door open. If he could enchant the man's machete...
Glass shattered next door, and children screamed. It sounded like it came from their porch... Lee glanced back at his own porch across the living room and saw a shadow moving on the other side. Shit!
He knew the window would hold... it would definitely hold... but the frog was so big.
A croak from next door was followed by a thud against the walls and a woman yelling something in Spanish while high-pitched voices wailed.
Lee opened his door and stuck his head outside in time to see human silhouettes exiting the neighbor's front door and moving toward the man with the glowing pot-lid shield. Two of the silhouettes were small... child-sized.
Their small wailing voices tugged at his heart, and Lee cursed to himself. He didn't know any of his neighbors and didn't care about any of them, not really. But he wasn't heartless enough to hide away when he could help... especially children. Besides, it wasn’t like he had to risk his life to help them.
I'm going to regret this.
"Get in here," Lee called to the shapes behind the glowing pot lid. He stepped back, opening the door wider... and saw movement across the courtyard.
It was too dark to see anything clearly, especially past the glowing pot lid, but Lee caught the movement and tried to retreat before he could get eaten. The neighbors were too far away... they wouldn't make it.
He almost got the door closed... but the tongue hit a moment too soon, and the door slammed into his face. Again. I really need to stop doing that...
The good news was that he landed back on his own floor again, rather than inside a frog's stomach. He rolled sideways to get away from the open door, and his neighbors almost stepped on him when they charged inside. Primarily the woman with two children in her arms, who got shoved through the door by the man with the glowing shield. Right before he spun around to block something outside with another clang and flash of yellow light.
Lee scrambled away from them in the dark, remembering to grab his butter knife by the blade rather than the handle as he went back to the pile of silverware. Another rune stuck on another fork later, and the blue glow lit up the room.
A few pairs of eyes swung his way at the blooming light before the woman's gaze trailed down to the blood-slicked entryway she was currently slipping and sliding through. Lee hadn't realized just how much he'd been bleeding...
Debuff Removed: [Minor Bleeding]
Then the man backed through the doorway behind her, forcing her to move, and slammed it behind himself as another frog tried to squeeze through the gap. The door rang with a few impacts after it was closed but didn't budge.
"Thank you!" the man said, smiling as they all stared at him in the light of a glowing fork and a glowing pot lid. Lee only stared at the machete in the man's hand. He wanted it.
"Give me the machete," Lee said. "I can enchant it."
"No!" the woman said, then gasped after looking toward the porch and said something in Spanish. The man moved to her side as they looked at the porch. Lee shot a quick glance and saw the long tongue sliding in a disgusting display across the glass. He looked away quickly. It would hold.
"Wait!" Lee said when the man advanced toward the glass. "It's enchanted. It won't break!" He really hoped he was right about that...
They all watched the frog as it licked and head-butted the glass, but it did indeed hold. The small symbol pulsing into view in time with each impact lent extra credence to his enchanting claim.
"I can make your shield like that," Lee said, "and make the blade sharper."
There was no protest from the woman when the man handed over the pot lid, and Lee drew his rune on it in a few seconds. Either the light show impressed him, or the man was a fool because he handed over the machete after that.
Or he was confident and armed with a shield he'd been using quite well so far...
Lee put two runes on the blade, carefully this time, with one to make the actual blade sharper and the other to make the whole thing nigh indestructible. He considered his options while doing that.
He might be able to hold on to the weapon now that it was in his hands and enchanted, but... the thought of fighting these people or forcing them back out of his home felt... bad. Plus, it just might be better to let someone else fight in his place, even with enchanted weapons. He could take it back if the guy got eaten...
The only other thing that gave him pause was the fact that they might threaten him in return, try to kick him out of his home... just thinking about the possibility made Lee aware he could take his runes back at any time with nothing more than the desire to do so.
Armed with that knowledge, and since he wasn't keen on fighting hand-to-hand with giant frogs, Lee held the machete out to the man. "Be careful. It's extremely sharp now."
"Gracias," the man said and took the weapon, showing more care than Lee expected, and while Lee waited anxiously in case of sudden betrayal. The man didn't try to kill him. Instead, he headed for the porch.
"Glass is enchanted," Lee reminded him. "It won't get..."
The man pulled the door open in a swift tug and then chopped the frog nearly in half before the blade sparked off the floor beneath it when he met no resistance to his strike. As it should be...
Gore splashed through the door before he could close it, but the man was smiling when he turned back around. "Excelente!" Even Lee knew what that word meant.
Then the man headed for the front door with his pot shield in one hand and machete in the other. The woman said something in rapid-fire Spanish, and they went back and forth in an exchange that Lee had no chance to follow, but he got the gist.
The man wanted to go back outside, and the woman wanted him to stay put. Lee was on her side. What good was giving the guy gear if he ran off and died somewhere? Better he use it to defend them here. Plus, if he died nearby at least Lee could get his loot.
Unfortunately, the yells and croaks outside only seemed to spur the man into action, and he left despite her protests.
The building shook from another heavy impact shortly after he vanished, and the woman turned angry eyes on Lee.
Don't blame me, Lee thought, looking away to grab up the last of his silverware and turn it all into weapons. He only made one before something slammed into his apartment again.
Lee flinched, but a glance confirmed that everything still held. A quick look through the glass was less satisfying when he saw another of the giants crawling down from the roof. Shit, shit! He really hoped they didn't just bring the whole building down around him...
Lee was almost finished with the utensils when a man yelled outside, and he looked up to see the woman open the door right before more people staggered through. Almost a dozen of them. What the fuck!?
As they came through, there was a clang and another impact that sent the man with his shield bowling them over.
Lee didn't stick his head around the door but threw another handful of sharpened utensils through the open door, including one light, hoping to repeat his successful tactic from before.
He wasn't sure if it worked, and then the man ran back outside again. Leaving a bunch of strangers in Lee's apartment...
Lee tried to ignore the crying and distraught people as he finished the last of his improvised weapons. He just had to be a hero and open the door to let the first one in... Somehow, he doubted that telling them to all fuck off was going to go over well.
A glance out the window sent chills down his spine when he saw two more of the behemoths climbing down into the courtyard. They were going to destroy the building at this rate. Even now, their tongues shot out in every direction, each impact breaking something. At least, anything he hadn't enchanted yet...
Lee glanced at the ceiling as another impact knocked some of the popcorn from it... then he scrambled to get up on the kitchen counter, and his bloody hands slipped free. He scrubbed his hands on his jeans again; he really hoped regeneration helped with infections, then successfully scaled the counter.
His right arm was just shy of total numbness, but Lee braced it with his left hand and started drawing. His mana regeneration seemed to be very high, or else his small runes just didn't need very much. Either way, his mana was sufficient for what he had in mind.
It still felt... unpleasant, but he forced the Mana out as he drew the symbol and felt it spreading to encompass the entire roof, or rather, the slab of cement that was his ceiling.
Lee could already feel far too many cracks in the slab as his Rune spread to include it all, and he realized he needed to do something more, or they were all going to find out what it was like to be inside a falling building. Only they would be inside an unbreakable box, while the rest crumbled around them. Lee wasn't sure how that would work, and he didn't want to find out.
There was a resonance he'd felt earlier between his runes on the floor and walls. It was something he'd ignored in favor of expediency, but now he reached for it.
They were all the same Rune, and they all touched upon each other where they met at the edges and corners. Lee brought them together now, and then he pushed them to claim every wall and floor below.
Immediately, Lee realized he didn't have nearly enough Mana for this, and worse, it was too late to back out. Trying to stop now would require removing the runes he'd already placed, leaving them all defenseless against the giant monsters crawling around outside.
He reached out for his Mana Well in desperation. Before he’d directly touched it before to refill his pool, but he didn't think that was strictly necessary. It was bound to him; it said as much, so he should be able to pull from it...
He pulled, and for an agonizingly long moment, nothing happened. Lee begged and pleaded, he strained, he demanded, and finally, the mana moved.
It more than moved. It raged across the short distance, swirling into and then right back out of him as it fed the glowing Rune on the ceiling.
If all these strangers in his apartment hadn't seen the Well before, they definitely couldn't miss it anymore... not with how much mana he could feel tearing through the air between him and the Well.
Unfortunately, in his desperate greed for safety, Lee had grossly underestimated just how much mana this was going to require, and now he was pretty sure his arm was melting as he forced his finger to finish tracing the Rune, his other hand doing most of the movement by dragging his right arm through the motions. He also might have screamed...
Then, all at once, it was over.
Lee didn't need to look at his arm to know it was glowing, and he had no desire to look closer. He didn't want to know how bad it was.
Besides, his vision was tunneling, and he couldn't see anything, anyway. Though it felt like he might be falling... hadn't he climbed up on something?
He was safe, though. Everyone in here should be safe now, and if anyone got any ideas about killing him... they would lose the rune protection as soon as Lee died. So that was something, at least...
Then his head bounced off an extremely durable and powerfully enchanted concrete floor.