The Runic Artist

Kiri ran across the grasslands as fast as she could. It had all been going so well. She’d managed to slowly work her way through the entire fort, killing every last one of the little green bastards. Or at least, so she had thought. The grisly work had taken her all the way to level nine, allowing her to add The Size of a Soul to her list of skills. That’s when things had taken a turn for the worse.

In her elation at her new Class, she’d forgotten about the lookouts. The little bastards had been no threat to her. They had however been a fairly massive threat to their own fort. She wouldn’t have minded them burning it down but it had turned into a signal that could apparently be seen across the grasslands. The yips of Hyelash’s and the grunting of their riders could be heard on the wind behind her as she sprinted through the grass.

Apparently there was more than one fort out here on the grasslands and another small horde of goblins had come to investigate the burning fort. That might’ve been okay if the wind hadn’t changed direction shortly after she had leaped over the burning palisades. The bloody hyelash’s had caught her scent and that had been the end of her hope of a quiet escape. If only she hadn’t taken so long finishing off the lookouts after they set fire to the place. In the end she’d resorted to utilising Soul Shift to close with them to avoid the flung shit they had employed. A lesson learned. A little shit now was better than a lot of shit later.

She was confident she could take them with her new dagger. It was the reward she received for killing the chieftain, and just like Frick and Nate had said, the reward had been inflated by her doing so alone. She glanced at the notification again as she continued to sprint away from the burning pillar of fire in the distance behind her.

Dagger of the Torn Soul (Rare)

A dagger crafted for an assassin who used soul magic to mark and track his prey. A single cut causes a small amount of soul energy to ‘bleed’ from the wound until it is healed.

Stats: +3 Agility, +3 Willpower

Features: Innate Repair (Rare), Soul Bleed (Common)

Innate Repair: This item is Enchanted to repair themselves over time using ambient mana. Feeding the Enchantment mana can accelerate this process.

Soul Bleed: This item is Enchanted to cause any wounds inflicted by it to bleed soul energy until the wound is healed, either naturally or by magical means.

The first magical item she had earned in a Dungeon. With this she suspected she’d be able to cut her enemies and drain at least some soul energy while they still lived. Bleeding it into the air sounded like it was meant for tracking but any unbound soul energy sounded like it would be ripe for her Soul Drain skill. So why was she running and not fighting? Because she didn’t trust herself to be able to evolve a Legendary skill to Mythic. Sure, Nate had done it. But he almost seemed like a savant when it came to runes. She had no one to compare to beyond Helmfirth’s Enchanter and while he didn’t do ‘bad’ work, he didn’t have Nate’s knack for just coming up with new and novel designs.

She was confident she could fight. Her Father had drilled that into her. Tactics, strategy, positioning, leverage. He’d passed on everything he’d been trained in, as far as she knew. But that wasn’t going to help her delve the secrets of the Spiritual Realm and soul energy. Frick might help, but she wasn’t about to rely on the Familiar for a mythic evolution. It just seemed like too long of a shot.

But she wasn’t without hope. Nate had asked Frick to walk her through the Dungeon Rewards and that was how she had found out about her best, if riskiest, chance at achieving a Mythic evolution. Class Core Enhancement. A guaranteed Mythic evolution. All she had to do was find the Bonus Challenge that Nate had assured her existed and then defeat it while remaining below level ten. It was beyond dangerous. She was definitely going to do it. She’d fight for every inch if she had to. To walk her path as far as she could with her best friend. That was why she couldn’t turn and fight the goblin riders. She was already level nine. One more would be enough to push her over the threshold and she needed all the bonuses from the challenge to even have a hope of getting Class Core Enhancement as an option. So all that was left was evasion.

The first step had to be concealing her smell or else they’d run her down no matter how far she ran. Extracting the Fire rune Nate had made for her from the spatial storage she lit the grass nearby on fire. She gave it a moment to build until she was sure she could see which way the smoke was blowing. With the smoke to conceal her and her smell, she enveloped herself with the Shadowskin rune and started running through grass, keeping as low as she could as the fumes billowed over her head and the fire began to spread. The yips and yells of the goblin riders and their mounts carried on the wind but she could hear them turning to frustration as they reached the fire, having clearly lost her smell.

Of course, the little bastards weren’t completely stupid. If they couldn’t find her smell then she had to be downwind of the fire. With more growls and guttural shouts they gave chase in her direction. She’d expected this. How to lay false trails was just one of her Father’s many lessons. Not that they’d ever worked on him. But these goblins weren’t Royal Rangers. As she knelt in the long grass waiting for them to get closer she kept her will focused on that small piece of soul energy, her soul she supposed, that she had left hanging by the fire.

The distance she was at was as far as she could utilise it so far. Forty metres. As the last of goblins gave chase, she finally activated Soul Shift. Vanishing, she appeared back at her soul energy marker on the other side of the fire. Without pausing she took off sprinting in the opposite direction, Shadowskin still active to make her harder to see in the dark and hopefully make her scent a little less obvious. It was a temporary solution. But temporary was all she needed. She just needed to buy herself enough time to find the Bonus Challenge.

*************

She’d spent most of the night running. She didn’t have the Endurance that would allow her to do it on her own and so had resorted to utilising One Soul, One Body to keep refreshing herself. Thankfully, the drain on her soul energy hadn’t been terrible but it hadn’t been light either and she was now arriving at what she thought was her destination with only as much soul energy as she could normally contain. The additional thirty percent from Size of a Soul burned through to keep her going. She glanced at her notifications as she approached the large crater.

One Soul, One Body 2 > 5

Soul Shift 4 > 5

She thought she was probably going to need that ability to heal herself after this battle as she gazed down into the crater in the middle of the grasslands. Most of the crater looked like it had formed naturally, either from something large falling from the sky or perhaps a god’s angry fist. But there were unnatural additions now. What looked like dirt seats in layers, moving upwards and outwards gave it the same air as those places that you could go to see plays. It took her a moment to remember the word. It looked like an amphitheatre. At the centre of it, she could see something that looked like a goblin, only bigger. She’d heard of Hobgoblins, but never seen one. The thing was watching her as it paced back and forth, a huge club held in its hand.

The hobgoblin never left the circle of dirt at the bottom of the basin as it watched her. Just marching back and forth as it waited. It was purely a guess that this was the Bonus Challenge of the Dungeon, as she didn’t have any identification Skills to determine the creature's level. All she could do was go on gut feel. Her gut said this was it. A lone challenge.

Marching down into the amphitheatre she readied herself. Her mana reserve was full, though the Shadowskin rune would need recharging later. Due to her self-healing skill, she was as ready as she was going to get. Drawing both her daggers, she approached the creature. As she got closer she realised she had been wrong about a couple of things. The basin was bigger than she had thought and so was the creature. It was an orc. Not a hobgoblin.

It towered over her, at least two metres in height, with a dark green skin covering its body and a tuft of black hair held back by leather. Its only attempt at modesty was a loin cloth, though that was at least decorated with some symbols in red. Maybe they meant something to the orc but they just looked like scribbles to her. Two tusks jutted up out of its mouth, framing a flattened nose and dark beady black eyes. It didn’t look stupid though, as she felt it watching her intently.

As she approached the dirt circle at the bottom of the basin, the Orc’s lips curled up into a vicious smile, raising its club and calling to her in its guttural language, “Den nuk dieran hashka!”

“Yeah, the same to you,” Kiri growled in reply, stepping into the dirt circle and immediately moving towards the Orc, her brown hair streaming behind her as she dashed across the ground. There was no point in keeping her distance. She could’ve taken out her bow but without her skills to enhance the arrows they likely wouldn’t have even been able to penetrate the skin of the Orc. No, she needed her daggers. Shadows crept forth from her hands and covered her blades as she activated Shadow Aligned Dual Daggers. The mana drain was small and with the skill active she was confident she could cut the creature.

As she moved within the Orc's reach, its club blurred towards her from her left side. Driven by the creature's strength it whistled as she slipped beneath it. She wasn’t as fast as she had been, but she was no slouch either and she used the moment to slash twice at its legs, scoring hits on both before she was forced to dance a little away as it attempted to bodycheck her. That little dance turned into a bigger one as the club came back faster than expected, the air from its passing blowing her hair back as she barely avoided the strike.

She activated Soul Drain to start pulling in the soul energy from the cuts only to see the Orc smirk at her around its tusks as its legs glowed with a red energy, the cuts sealing over. By the Gods she was so tired of bloody Berserkers. First Torian, and now this fucker? Well, its mana was finite, and she had tools for dealing with that. Running away from it across the dirt of what she now assumed was the stage for their battle, she reached into the spatial storage and pulled out the Earthen Projectile rune Nate had given her. It wasn’t going to finish the Orc off, but hopefully she could use it to drain some of its mana.

The Orc didn’t just sit and watch her, jogging after her in a thudding run that echoed through the amphitheatre, club held in front of it in two hands. She began firing off spears of earth from the rune as she continued to run in circles. The Orc made no effort to avoid the projectiles, though occasionally it raised its clubs to block a few that might have hit it in the face. The wounds the earthen spears left upon the creature faded quickly but every bit was a little less mana it had. The rune wasn’t going to last forever though and she was loath to use her own mana on it. That meant she was going back into melee range soon.

Soon came quicker than expected when the Orc put on a burst of speed, before slamming its club down into the dirt while still two steps away from her. The impact was larger than expected, a skill she thought, as it threw her from her feet and chunks of hardened dirt impacted her. The Orc was towering over her a second later, club raised. As it descended, she activated Soul Shift, vanishing and appearing a few metres away. The rune however hadn’t survived the blast. Small pieces of wood littering the area. That pissed her off. Nate would’ve just said it was a tool and had served its purpose. But it was her tool, and a gift from her best friend.

She thought for a second about her options. There was no point using the Barrier rune. It wasn’t anchored to anything so even if it absorbed the damage from a strike it would still see her launched across this dirty excuse of an arena. The fire and light runes weren’t going to help. All there was left was to commit to what her Class represented. A Soulshade. One who slid between this realm and the Spiritual Realm. She’d been hesitant to overuse her Skills, the drain on her soul energy, something that she feared, for in her heart she was certain that if she ever ran out of soul energy, she would die.

Her blue eyes took on the appearance of steel as she watched the Orc raise its club slowly, an eager and vicious grin now decorating its tusked face. What was death to her? She’d already died once. This was her second chance. The chance she’d always wanted. The chance to be a hero. The chance to walk a Path to the very end. The chance to do it beside her best friend. All she had to do was keep up, and this Orc, this Challenge, was standing in her way. There was no more time for second guessing. No more time for hesitation. It was time to prove to herself, as much as to this Challenge, that she could fight at this level.

Dashing forward she faked going low before leaping over the swing of the Orcs club, burying both her shadow-coated daggers in its chest in a small spray of black blood. Leaping off the Orc she rolled backwards before returning to her feet in one smooth motion. The wounds she had inflicted were already closing even as she regained her feet. She was going to need more. It was time to push her Skills to see just how far they could go. With a cold stare she rushed back into battle.