“Ash, Ralph is right about the symbols. But I need you to decide this for yourself. For one thing, it’s going to hurt like hell. Your body isn’t nearly ready for this, and that means your muscles are probably going to hurt more than they ever have in your life,” I explained as I looked down at her.

  Her breathing had grown shallow as her face paled further, but she was still conscious. This was a decision I couldn’t make for her. Partially because I didn’t actually know the long-term ramifications of it, but mostly, because of how much it was going to hurt her.

  Runic inscriptions on people were nothing new. In theory, they weren’t that different from tattoos. But much like tattoos, they worked best when done by an expert with real preparation, on a body that was physically okay with having them.

  I wasn’t an expert, but I knew Ash was not remotely healthy enough for this. And while it wouldn’t kill her, hopefully doing exactly the opposite, it would still drastically extend her road to full recovery. It was something else new she would have to learn to master, along with everything else she was being thrust into.

  But she would live and be able to learn. Like all the other choices we’d been given so far, it was a matter of choosing the least shitty option.

  “I kind of always wanted a tattoo, I guess this counts as one,” Ash said grimly. Despite the tone, her lips were curled into half a smile.

  As much as I wanted to press ahead, I still needed to make sure she understood what she was getting into here. This was potentially more life-altering than anything else we had done so far. Considering her age, though, I wasn’t totally sure I could truly impress that into her.

  Hell, I wasn’t sure I could impress that into myself.

  “Ash, there’s a good chance this changes your future, a lot, in ways I can’t predict or guess enough to explain, so I need you to be sure, or at least as sure as you can be,” I said, keeping my voice as reassured as I could muster. She was getting worse, but she still had the right to make these decisions for herself.

  “But it means I get a future, right? Just do it. I doubt it’s going to hurt much worse than what I’ve been through already,” she replied, her breathing growing more ragged with each word until cutting off in rough coughing.

  “It does. I won’t ask again. I’ll explain each thing I’m doing as I do it. Just try to stay focused on your breathing.” I heated up the sword again as I said this, wanting to burn any contamination from the knife.

  Ralph was standing nearby, petting Floof as I worked. His head was moving back and forth, scanning the forest. I suspected he was keeping watch in his own way. The question was how much he could easily alert us to.

  He was already pushing the bounds beyond what I thought he could safely communicate to us. I hadn’t expected anywhere near the suggestions he had been providing so far, but he had been careful in his phrasing. That much was likely to remain, which meant I needed to get used to solving riddles anytime he spoke. At least they weren’t overly cryptic.

  When forging my sword, the symbols had been a masterful labor. The woman who had done so first started with the metal, beating layers of magic into the material each time she folded it, working the arcane into the very essence of it, just to prepare the surface she would scribe upon.

  Then, the blade infused with mana, working in a perfectly built and fully crewed mana forge, an endless supply of raw mana spewing out at her disposal, she had spent week after painstaking week carving a single line of a single symbol, then testing the whole symbol, then each pair together, until thousands upon thousands of hours had made her ready for the true attempt. I had a pocket knife, a weak mana flow, and a sick kid. Somewhere in the woods were very angry spiders, likely regrouping for another attack. They couldn’t let me take their stronghold, not without an all-out battle.

  That probably also meant they were trying to contact their queen. Which added another ticking clock to this. At least the experience bonus from all of this would push Ash pretty fast.

  Reaching up, I ripped a small branch off the nearby tree and broke it down to size quickly.

  “Here, bite down on this,” I said, holding it in front of her mouth. She did so without question.

  Counter to her words earlier, the fear of what was about to happen was plain on her face. As I brought the knife to the back of her right arm, she flinched just slightly. Despite that, her arm stayed in place to be worked on, ready.

  Using the sword as my template, I went to work. I started with the circles at the bottom of the hilt. There were three of them interlaid there. Each was a different size, with the smallest being inside the next smallest, both contained in the largest. All three met at a single point, creating a design that looked like three circles sprouting from the bottom of the pommel.

  Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

  There were two red points marking where the spider had bitten her. I overlapped the joining point of the three circles with the punctures. It almost certainly meant they would scar, but considering I was slicing a hot knife through her arm, I didn’t think a little extra scarring was that big of a concern.

  The stick crunched as I cut the first circle with my right hand. My left stayed in contact with my sword, drawing mana from it through me, and back out into the shape. The hardest part of maintaining the focus was directing that mana flow. Keeping the flow exactly at the right levels as I worked the knife was critical.

  I couldn’t risk a cascade, one that could easily destroy her arm. On the opposite end, too little, and the bleeding could quickly get out of control. Her focus, Stem the Blood Flow, would help with that aspect, but if I could avoid taking any of its power away from the venom coursing through her, I’d prefer that.

  While I worked on the second circle, the first shimmered lightly as the mana fused with it, making it far more than just a scar. In theory, once I finished it, it would work similar to her focus. I hoped they might complement each other. Magics could often work like that, but it was only a hope it would here.

  I knew next to nothing about how magical glyphs or runes interplayed with other System abilities within a human body. I wasn’t even totally sure I knew the difference between the two at all, other than their names. I was mostly relying on Ralph having some special insight and purposefully guiding me using it. It just needed to function similar to how it did on the sword.

  The symbol I was currently working with was a glyph to help harden the sword. That was why it was at the base and the first one inscribed. Without it, all of the mana that had been infused into the blade would have easily destroyed it.

  Marjara, the Forge Scripter, had called it Stalplaht’s Glyph, which I was sure had a meaning behind it, but I had never asked. Most magical things had names, and they were usually just based on who created them or who popularized them.

  As I connected the third circle back in on itself, Ash cracked the stick in two. The mana seared through the knife, burning into the carvings. The bleeding stopped instantly.

  Ash’s breathing returned to normal as she slumped down further, consciousness slipping away. I had expected that. While it had been slow, I had still pushed as much mana into her body as I had taken into my own during the fight with the rats, and that hadn’t been easy on me. So it had almost certainly been hell on her.

  But she already looked and sounded better, and that was what mattered. We could deal with the aftereffects when she woke up. How long that would be, I didn’t know, but I hoped we wouldn’t be forced to spend the day here.

  Leaning closer, I pulled the remains of the stick from her mouth. Was she muttering something in her sleep?

  I couldn’t make out any words, but it sounded like she was.

  That was concerning. While it could be normal, the timing wasn’t great. That telepathic creature was still hunting around somewhere, but I doubted it was willing to face me again. If this was connected to anything, it had to be the glyph.

  “Ralph, I’m done. I think it’s working. She’s talking in her sleep, strangely. Any idea what that could mean?” The concern was obvious in my question.

  “Nope. Haven’t done much exploration on the various magical scripting languages out there. While I can tell that three circle one is used to reinforce and strengthen the bonds of what it is inscribed into, I’ve never seen it outside of your blade. Could be she’s working through some strange mana dream, or her body is reworking itself somewhat around it. Gonna be hard to say until she wakes up, but I don’t think she’ll be out too much longer.”

  “Floof, come lie next to her,” I called to the dog. He could keep her warm and watched over, while I took a quick look around the battlefield.

  He turned. and looked at me with eyes that seemed to understand far better than they had yesterday, before doing exactly as I had asked. I gave him a nod as he cuddled his head into her arm.

  “I’ve been with you less than a day, and I’m already getting to witness a few things I haven’t quite seen before. This is proving quite worth it,” Ralph said as I neared him.

  “I’m guessing Ash is one of them. What are the others?” I asked, slightly annoyed that Ash had been an experiment, even though I knew it had been the correct choice. I didn’t like causing her pain. She was my daughter, and it was my job to protect her.

  I pushed those thoughts back down. Ralph hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just the stress of the situation getting to me. I didn’t need to lose my temper with someone who had been nothing but helpful so far.

  “That dog of yours figured out the System surprisingly fast. His growth is going to be very interesting. Then there’s that sword. How exactly did you manage to get something like that anyway?” Ralph asked.

  “It took several years, a lot of work making it, and even more time and effort hunting down the experts I needed to teach me how to create it,” I answered. That was an understatement. When you took into account the mana orbs, it was more like several lifetimes of work.

  The sword was one of my greatest achievements during my life in System space. It paled in comparison to what I had found outside it.

  “I wanna go,” Adam said, after the goblin had left. They had invited both of them to an auction in two months and had given them each a special ticket that would let them in.

  “First, we have to survive until it happens. But yeah, I wanna go too. I’m not sure we will have any way to buy anything, but at least we might find people who are still alive,” Alecks agreed.

  “So what do we do in the meantime?” Adam wanted to keep trying to find the blacksmith, but had no idea where to start.

  “I think we should try to hunt more of the frog monsters. I know it’s dangerous, but every time we gain one of those levels, we get stronger. It might be the only way we are going to survive this. And if we can get strong enough, we can go back home and deal with that monster ourselves!” Alecks answered strongly.

  Adam nodded, agreeing entirely with the plan. As scared as he was just thinking about the thing that had killed his family, he knew the only way they’d know peace was by avenging.

  Memories of Adam Miller before he found Earth

  Death March

  by E. S. Slimefall

  Congratulations, Jay, as an unremarkable soul responsible for killing a candidate, you have been granted candidate status for this planet’s death march. I envy you.

  Gods, systems, a death game for control of his planet? He has no clue what any of that means. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. But it could be the second chance he was looking for.

  With a determination he forgot he had, he embraces this new reality. Aliens, humans just looking to exploit their fellow man, and even gods — he doesn’t care what tries to stand in his way, he will break through it. The world had changed, and he was going to take it all if he had to.

  Welcome to the 76th Death March!