Whatever Yanily did, it sent shockwaves barreling out through the rest of Visionary. Lightning bolts arced between still-standing buildings, the sky alternatingly looked further or closer than it should be, and even the party’s Raid Interface went wonky. Names and statuses flickered in and out of existence, making Nivian’s unbeating heart almost start up just so it could stop again.

  He’s just as bad as Seena for overdoing things, Nivian sighed to himself, stomping forward and bringing his left arm to deflect one of the Raze’s predictable shoulder-blasts. The blue energy of his Aspect weathered the shot, only small cracks forming, before Nivian stepped in, the long hammer in his other hand dragging a divot through the street behind him.

  A duck to evade a horizontal claw slash he saw coming a mile away, and he twisted hard at his waist, whipping the hammer up and around with all the considerable power his Aspect could muster. Chips of crystal trailed behind the hammer from the road, until it caught the bottom of the Raze’s extended chin. The shockwave from the impact shattered the windows—and crystal covering them—from nearby buildings, causing bolts of electricity to form a net in the falling debris, while the Raze’s whole body flipped backward headfirst.

  The back of its crystal skull hit the ground along with its shoulders, first, before the momentum of the blow kicked its legs back and up, flipping the thing completely until it landed on its chest.

  “Why don’t you stay down this…” Nivian started, but didn’t get to finish, the Raze already pushing itself back up. It was the same problem Nivian had most of the time. He could take a pounding, and pretty much delay anything forever, but even with how impressive his attacks looked, they just didn’t do the damage needed to truly slow this opponent down.

  “Despite its looks,” Wule said, voice crackling over the raid chat that likely only worked because of how close he was. “That thing does not have a glass jaw.”

  “Thank you for the observation,” Nivian said flatly. “I’ll try the knee next to see if…”

  He didn’t get to finish, the Raze launching off like a sprinter that closed the distance between the two fighters faster than Nivian could react. Driving its shoulder straight into the abdomen of his Aspect, the Raze lifted Nivian from the ground, his legs and arms stretching above the crystal body until his back slammed into a heavily crystalized building. The sudden stop to the motion had him splaying spread-eagle against the building, but that only lasted until the Raze absolutely laid into him.

  Fists a blur, it was like the crystal giant had been possessed, its four hands suddenly moving like a trained pugilist, instead of the beast-like attacks he’d been dealing with before. Powerful blows landed across his torso, shoulders, chest, and armored head, each impact sending cracks spiderwebbing out. Nivian tucked his arms up to try and protect himself, but against four arms—and point-blank cannons that joined in on the fun—he just didn’t have enough limbs to protect himself.

  Which meant defense wasn’t his best option, he needed to go on the…

  The fists stopped just long enough for the Raze’s massive tail to come around in a whipping motion that caught Nivian in the ribs just as he’d been about to try and tackle his enemy. Easily three times as powerful as the combined might of all the punches, the sweeping blow ripped Nivian from the ground, and sent him flying through a line of buildings.

  The collision would’ve torn the air from his lungs—if he still needed to breathe—and had his head spinning, though he immediately pushed one leg under himself. Blue flame leaked from a dozen cracks in his Aspect, namely around where the tail had just hit him, but he ignored them for the moment. He’d…

  … whip his head and torso back just in time to avoid two crystal spikes violently growing out of the ground and looking to spear him through the face. No sooner was he leaning back on one knee, than the Raze was right there, ripping the crystal spikes out of the ground while it tackled Nivian. Weight and power driving his back to the ground, the Death Knight fought against the two fists punching and scratching at his face.

  Unfortunately, all that did was distract him from the real threat. Namely, the two spikes the Raze had just grabbed and proceeded to stab into Nivian’s sides. Even as durable as his Aspect was, it couldn’t stand up to the S-Rank strength of the Raze, with one of the spikes driving in one hip and out the other. The second spike, that was even worse, punching up his chest and just barely missing where Nivian sat within the heart of his Aspect.

  Staying in the head had proven risky earlier in the fight, so he’d moved himself, and it was clear the Raze had noticed. Now, with the leverage on the two spikes, it yanked, tearing Nivian’s Aspect apart, sending real pain lancing through his connected body. And, as soon as he tensed from the shock of it, the Raze’s other two hands latched on to his face and head, then began to squeeze.

  More fissures spread along his armor, and it was clear he wasn’t going to be able to pry off the Raze’s hands from his face.

  Mutual destruction it is.

  Solar energy flowed into his right hand—the one that’d lost his hammer while he’d gotten thrown around—and he jerked it up and around the Raze’s neck before it fully solidified. Grabbing the other end of a whip seemingly formed from segmented spinal columns, Nivian looped it again and pulled it tight.

  Clearly, the Raze didn’t seem terribly worried about getting choked. It was a giant construct after all.

  Too bad for it, Nivian wasn’t trying to do that. It was only when the slightly serrated spinal segments began to move on their own, like a chain of gnashing blades, that the Raze realized what was going on. From zero to sixty—rotations per second, of course—in the span of heartbeats, a new sound of grinding and shredding joining the tearing and peeling.

  Locked like that, the two opponents stared into each other’s eyes, Nivian pulling the Raze closer as the chain sawed through its neck, showering his face in crystal dust and shards. Another second, and the squeezing hands changed to pushing, as the Raze tried to extricate itself.

  Nivian wasn’t letting go though. He had it this time. All he had to do was endure the clawing and pounding. And he was good at enduring.

  “… ivian,” a voice creaked through the intermittent raid chat. “Nivian!”

  “Wule?”

  “Finally,” his brother said. “Romin’s Raze got away from him. It’s coming this way. Fast.”

  “To help this one?” Nivian said.

  “No,” Wule said, urgency creeping into his voice. “It’s heading toward Hiral.”

  “Dammit,” Nivian cursed, jerked his chains first to the right, then to the left to throw the weight of the Raze off-balance. As soon as the thing leaned to the side, Nivian rolled up with it, getting on top of it, before throwing all his weight further in the roll until his shoulder met the ground again. Dragging the Raze with him through the motion, he pulled with all his might one more time—hoping to take the thing’s head off, but that was apparently asking too much. Instead, he had to settle for hurling the crystal construct two blocks away, while he used his momentum to get to his feet.

  Already, solar energy from his brother was mending the terrible tears in his Aspect, but his eyes were scanning the field for what Wule had told him about. There, a Raze charging across the field in Hiral’s direction. Behind it, Romin was just getting to his feet, and getting ready to give chase—probably a Blink Charge—when a another Raze tackled the Bonder from the side.

  The pair of them hadn’t even hit the ground when Ilrolik—in that wolf-form she’d assumed—joined the fray in a snarling, biting fury.

  That wasn’t even the only strange thing, with Seena’s target also charging in Hiral’s direction, and completely ignoring the heavy, fiery blasts digging chunks out of its unprotected back.

  Something is different. Something changed. Is it what Right and Yanily did? Or is something Hiral is doing? Is he getting close to completing, and they can sense it?

  If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “Hiral,” Nivian said into the raid chat, even as he took his first step in Hiral’s direction. He had to stop those two Raze. He had to protect Hiral to protect everybody else. “Hiral, can you hear me?”

  No response. Because the raid chat wasn’t working? Or was he just so focused on his task he didn’t even know the Raze were coming for him?

  “Nivian!” Wule’s voice came through the raid chat, almost like he was gasping. Something about the sound of it was enough to make the Death Knight stop, snapping his head around to see what had made his brother sound like that.

  At the sight, something seemed to reach into his chest and squeeze his still heart.

  The Raze had Wule in one of its hands. Clawed fingers wrapped around the comparatively tiny man, it held the fist forward, like it wanted to make sure Nivian knew what it held. A second hand lifted to rest above Wule, leaving it in such a place a simple gesture would crush the Grower between them. Finally, a third hand came up, a single finger waggling the ‘come here’ gesture.

  It was… holding his brother hostage. Threatening Nivian with Wule’s death if he went to save Hiral. The Raze was making him choose between Wule and… and everybody else. If Hiral failed, it was over. Genesis would never get home. If Nivian let those two Raze reach Hiral, he would fail. If Nivian moved to stop them, this Raze would kill Wule.

  Nivian had to protect Hiral, but he couldn’t leave his brother.

  What was he going to do…?

  “Nivian,” Wule said, voice somehow much calmer. “Go.”

  “Wule, I can’t…” Nivian said, his eyes meeting his brother’s. The eyes of his friend and partner, the person who’d had his back since the minute they were born. The one who’d always been beside him. Who he thought always would be.

  “Go. Protect them.”

  The words were clear. Confident. Wule knew his dilemma, of course he did. And, in this moment, he was being the brave, decisive one. Because he knew Nivian wouldn’t leave him unless he told him to.

  “I’m… sorry,” Nivian sobbed out, then turned and sprinted away from his brother.

  “I forgive you,” Wule said quietly just before the hand of the Raze came down.

  ***

  Sera turned away as the hand come down on Wule—The poor boy—and turned her attention to Nivian as he sprinted in the direction of the two Raze heading in her son’s direction. Sorrow practically poured off the man like sweat, even to Sera at the distance, like he’d just lost a part of himself. In reality, that was likely true.

  She’d used what buffs she could on the healer, but with the broken Raid Interface, she had no idea if it’d made a difference, and she couldn’t bring herself to look. Against the power of the crystal giants, anything less than a tank would be little more than dry kindling in their hands. She had liked the boy—not in any way her husband would be jealous of, despite the joking. He was just a well-behaved child, proud of his brother, and keen on taking care of those he loved.

  He had even accepted her into the raid group, despite her previous behaviour toward Hiral. When she’d asked him why he didn’t hate her like the others did, he’d given her a very frank answer. He did hate her for what she’d done to Hiral, but he’d also been wrong about somebody before. Her son, from the context of the conversation. He didn’t want to make the same mistake again, so he’d decided to give her a limited chance.

  That small gesture had given her more hope than she’d felt in twenty years, that perhaps, there was a small chance somebody else wouldn’t hate her, despite how much she deserved it.

  Sadly, she needed to put Wule out of her mind—she would mourn the boy later—and focused on the flow of the battle. She didn’t have the same Atn her son did, nor the experience in a fight like his whole group did. What she had—in spades—was experience of a different kind.

  She could read energy, and the way it moved, like words on a page. It was the skill that allowed her to function as a competent member of the raid party, even though she’d never entered a dungeon—or a fight—until she’d come to the surface. Her work as an artist had taught her much about how energy flowed, and how the body would flow with it. A battle was no different.

  There would be paths of least resistance when rushing ahead. There would be nodes—targets—of importance, during crucial moments. There would be times when the energy would rush ahead, flooding locations when it had the advantage, and others, where it would retreat. A Maker’s body did the same thing when getting inked with new tattoos. It was like a battlefield, with the Artist standing as general over all of it, guiding their ink through a defending force.

  It may’ve sounded improper to many Artists, but their role was to conquer the Shaper’s bodies, and make them subservient to the tattoos.

  Everything playing out in front of her, from the movement of the Endless, the flow of the Blightfire Spites, the Raze, and even her raid party, it all made sense to her. Right and Left, and then Yanily, had done something to their opponents. Something that had put the remaining Raze at a disadvantage. Then, with Hiral growing closer to completing his working, they grew desperate. Caution was thrown to the wind, as they drastically changed their tactics, suffering wounds they could’ve defended against in exchange for reaching her son.

  Even now, completely oblivious to what was coming for him—or completely trusting in his friends to defend him—Hiral worked on such a complex weave of solar energy, it nearly brought a tear to her eyes. His working was art. A beautiful, transcendent masterpiece.

  Like the Shaper test, Hiral had failed both the Artist and Academic’s tests. Looking at him now, she realized—more than ever—just how wrong she’d been about him. How wrong they’d all been.

  Everything that made an Academic, the hunger for knowledge, the will to explore and test, to push beyond the bounds of the known into the realm of the theoretical, it was on full display by Hiral’s work. From a Shaper, people expected unflinching will, a strength to overcome any obstacle, and the sheer power to crush anything that stood before them. By the way Hiral wrangled the rules of the universe, he did each of those things. They did not just heed his requests because he was like them—no matter what he said or felt—they did it because they knew, instinctively, he could command them if he had to.

  Finally, from an Artist, Fallen Reach expected a deft hand. The ability to adapt to change, and plan several steps ahead. An artist was also required to be an expert on the topic of PIMs, even though they didn’t have a label for the internal checks and balances of a body until recently.

  Even without the naming convention, Sera and Elezad had been maestro’s when joining tattoos to PIMs. Hiral had inherited that skill. Except, it was on an entirely different level.

  He wasn’t just inking a tattoo on a body and the PIM inhabiting it. He was stitching his runic equations directly to Terminus’s PIM. To its PIMP, specifically, and connecting it through what Seeyela had brought him—the PIMP construct—to Genesis as well.

  Hiral wasn’t just rewriting his rules on the world, he was doing it throughout the world. And then connecting it to Genesis to create some kind of closed system.

  It was ingenious. It was mad. And, Sera had no idea what it would even do.

  Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be able to finish it. Not with the two Raze rushing in his direction. Nivian would be able to stop one, and even as she formed the thought in her head, the Death Knight threw himself at the first Raze, tackling it to the ground. At the same time, his hand snapped out, that blue-flame-spinal whip snaking in the other Raze’s direction.

  Even as it caught an ankle, Sera saw it. He was too late. Hiral needed…

  “Seeyela,” Sera said as the flow of battle brought the teleporting woman within range of the unreliable raid chat. Given the woman’s dislike of Sera, there was—at best—a sixty-percent chance she would actually stop.

  “What?” Seeyela said, perched on the corner of the building.

  It seems odds are in my favor.

  “I need you to take me to my son,” Sera said. “Those two Raze aren’t stopped.”

  “Why should I?” Seeyela asked, her protective nature of Hiral—perhaps because of her sister’s involvement with him, or because of their friendship—keeping her in place a second longer.

  “Because he needs us,” Sera said. “He needs me. And I must get to him.”

  On the ground near the pit where Hiral worked, Nivian rolled with the Raze, while his whip had caught the ankles of the second. With only one hand on each, he couldn’t contain either of them, both of them crawling in Hiral’s direction.

  The one with the whip around its ankles reached ahead, gripping the lip of the hole in the ground to pull itself closer, while the other dug its claws into the ground to crawl. With how defenseless Hiral was, they didn’t need to reach him, they just needed to get an angle to fire from. Their shoulder cannons would do the rest.

  “You will handle one, I will handle the other,” Sena said.

  “What can you even do?” Seeyela asked, hesitating another second, her eyes likely seeing the same probable future of the flow of battle below.

  “From one mother to another,” Sera said. “You know the answer. Anything.”

  Sera knew she didn’t deserve to call herself Hiral’s mother, but it didn’t change the fact she was. Or that she had so very much to make up for. She would start here, even if it finished here.

  “Fine,” Seeyela said, vanishing from the corner of the roof in a puff of purple smoke to appear beside Sera. Another second—and flash of purple smoke—and Sera was in the pit behind her son, looking up as the two shoulder cannons of the Raze peeked over the lip above.

  Off somewhere to her side, she vaguely heard two more cannons firing, but she would trust Seeyela to take care of them. Her Insatiable ability was particularly well-suited to handle one of the tasks. Sadly, there were two.

  Even as Sera stared up and into the barrels of the large cannons glowing brighter with the energy mounting within them, her heart was calm. Her blood didn’t pound in her ears, and her hands didn’t shake. Abilities activated one after the other, barriers and buffs that would hopefully protect her, and more importantly, the man behind her.

  The most powerful of her abilities she placed on Hiral, then put her Mediums—along with their defensive barriers—and her own body between the weapons now fully-charged and disgorging their powerful shots. According to her math, the Mediums would soften the first blast, while her body would soften the second. That should be enough to stop the attacks, leaving her injured, but alive.

  Her math went out the window as the blasts took on a hue she hadn’t seen before, and the flow of the battle shifted in front of her eyes. The Raze had put more energy into the attacks, at the cost of its own health, to ensure Hiral was destroyed.

  Time slowed as Sera once again did not panic, her mind running the new numbers, and she smiled with relief. Even with the increased power, her buffs would be enough to save Hiral. Sadly…

  “Tell your father and sisters how much I love them…” Sera said as a shadow fell over her, and the twin cannon shots arrived. “And you too.”

  Wanna Support Rune Seeker? Check out the Ebook and Audio Here! Thanks for your support:

  Amazon:

  Audible:

  Rune Seeker, Vol. 1 by J.M. Clarke, C.J. Thompson, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble?

  Rune Seeker (book 1) Book By Jm Clarke,cj Thompson, (Hardcover) | Indigo

  If you wanna chat about the book? Come to discord!

  If you're already on that discord? Go to "Get Roles" and you can get Rune Seeker updates, if you want :)

  Note my patreon does not have Rune Seeker chapters.