Return of the Runebound Professor

A sword hissed through the dark, headed straight for Noah’s throat. A vine shot out from behind him, grabbing the hand holding the sword’s blade and ripping its wielder out from where they hid behind a wall.

The man got just enough time to get a scream off before Moxie slammed him into a wall, silencing him forever.

Noah felt straw crunch beneath his feet. He glanced down, then smirked as he called on Combustion. A spark leapt from his foot, catching on the dry straw and combusting it with a whoomp.

Flame raced through the room, casting the large area in warm, orange light. He immediately spotted six people hiding around the barrels and crates scattered throughout the room as they were taken aback by the sudden light.

Six became five before Noah could blink. Lee’s axe crashed through a barrel and a man alike, severing the two of them in a single blow. Noah stepped into the fire, calling the embers around him like a cloak with Natural Disaster.

“You can’t do that!” one of the men screamed, scrambling toward the door at the far end of the room. “That’s what we–”

The rest of his sentence was lost in a pillar of hot ember and flame. It burned with such intensity that it scorched the cobbled wall behind him black. Noah let the flames flicker and fade away, then shook his hands off.

Left them too close to the fire. Whoops.

Wind swirled through the room. Two women ran toward Noah, their movements blurred by swirls of white energy. They swung their swords in a coordinated attack that would have been quite effective if Moxie hadn’t grabbed one of them by the leg with a vine and ripped her into the air, whipping the poor woman around and slamming her into her compatriot with enough force to shatter bone.

The two of them tumbled across the ground in a heap of limbs before smashing into a pile of barrels that toppled down on top of them with a loud crash. Noah winced despite himself. The remaining people in the room turned and sprinted away, diving through the door at the far end like it was a matter of life and death – which, Noah supposed, it was.

“I was expecting more after the last room,” Noah said, pushing the flames away from them as he stepped into the center of the room. “It kind of feels like we’re bullying them now.”

“You’ve got a disgustingly strong Rank 3 Rune,” Moxie said, eyeing Noah through squinted eyes. “Or have you forgotten? Compared to you, even if these idiots also had Rank 3 Runes, they wouldn’t stand a chance – and that’s not counting me or Lee.”

That’s a good point. Natural Disaster is a completely perfect Rank 3 Rune. I’d imagine that’s probably pretty dang rare, especially with how much the noble families control the flow of Runes. Of course, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if a noble family was somehow involved in all this, but I bet they’re not handing out their best runes to thugs.

“Careful,” Moxie said. Noah looked at her in surprise, and Moxie tapped a finger on her cheek. “You were looking a little… evil, I guess.”

Noah blinked. Azel’s laughter echoed through his head as it faded away before Noah could even push him back. Noah’s lips pressed thin and he gave Moxie an appreciative nod. “Thanks. Asshole was starting to try to fiddle with things again.”

“I’d imagine he will whenever we’re in an intense fight,” Moxie said. She waved toward the open door, where the screams of the two escapees were still echoing through the halls. If there were more bandits, they certainly knew the trio was coming. “We should keep moving, though. I’m starting to wonder just how deep this place goes. At least we know we definitely aren’t blowing up some poor bakery.”

How deep… I wonder that myself, actually. Do they have a network throughout all of Dawnforge? If they do, we’re completely screwed. There’s no way we’ll ever get all of them.

Noah drew a deep breath and adjusted his tremorsense, trying to tune out all the excess vibrations passing through his heels. There was an enormous amount of information coming from the city, but they’d already gotten pretty deep underground.

And, the deeper they got, the more muted all the people above became and the easier it was to start feeling out the underbelly of Dawnforge. Noah’s lips parted in a grin as his tremorsense latched onto a new set of information and streamed it into his mind.

“We don’t have to, actually.”

“What do you mean?” Moxie frowned. “You want to give up after we’ve come this far? There are more people. There’s no way they’ll let us off after killing off a bunch of their kind. This is like an infection. Rip the whole thing out or it’ll regrow.”

“Oh, I’m not giving up,” Noah said, drinking deeply from Natural Disaster’s reserves. The floor trembled beneath his feet as the magic churned within him, growing in strength. “I’m just taking a shortcut. Hold on, okay?”

Moxie and Lee latched onto Noah without asking another question. An instant later, Noah unleashed the power he’d gathered. The room screamed around them as the ground tore itself apart, a huge crevice splitting through the stone.

There might have been a few screams from some of the criminals that had been unlucky enough to get caught beneath Noah’s attack, but that might have just been his mind making things up. Dark stone flitted past them as they plummeted, falling deep into the earth.

Noah hadn’t held back on his spell, and he’d memorized exactly how deep the caverns actually went. Unfortunately, knowing how deep they were didn’t make him any better at timing his wind magic.

He released the surge of wind beneath their feet, canceling out a large portion of their momentum – but it was about a second too late. He adjusted quickly, increasing the force of the magic to keep them from splattering into the floor, but that was too much for Lee’s axe.

It slipped from her grip, plummeting and landing straight on the head of a cloaked man. He crumpled, knocked unconscious instantly by the heavy weapon, and hit the ground a moment before Noah and the others alighted beside him.

“Don’t drop heavy things when you’re falling,” Noah admonished. “You could hurt someone on accident.”

“Sorry,” Lee said, picking her axe back up. They all looked down at the unconscious man. He had no weapons, but there were a pair of twin swords sitting on the wall that looked like they would have been pretty wicked if in the right hands.

“You think we screwed up their fight order?” Lee asked.

“I hope so,” Noah said. “Idiots. What, did they really think we’d just go through everything room by room and get whittled down?”

“I’m pretty sure anyone else would have,” Moxie said, shaking her head. “Nobody goes straight through the ground. Whittling you down with a bunch of unimportant goons before you reach the important areas is pretty clever. With how far we fell, we would have probably been completely exhausted by the time we got to this point.”

“Don’t praise the criminals.”

“It’s not praise. I’m just acknowledging that they might know what they’re doing. This guy definitely isn’t a Rank 4, though. If he was, there’s no way a falling axe would have taken him out. That probably means it’s safe to assume that we don’t have any high ranked opponents waiting for us.”

Noah shrugged one shoulder, then looked up the huge hole he’d formed in the ground. “Just in case, you could both get back out if you needed to, right?”

“Probably something you should have asked before making said hole, but yes,” Moxie said. “My magic can let me climb things pretty easily.”

Whoops.

“Good,” Noah said. “And my bad. I was taking things one step at a time, but the step I was thinking about was killing these guys, not getting back out.”

Moxie sighed. “We’ll get there one day.”

The unconscious man shifted. One of his fingers twitched, and the swords on the wall trembled. There was a thud from behind a door at the back of the room, beside the swords. Lee swung her axe, cutting his head off with a thunk. Noah and Moxie looked at her.

“What?” Lee asked. “He was going to randomly pop up and start doing cool fighting stuff. I just avoided the problem before it happened.”

“No complaints here.” Noah raised his hands. “I think the swords were moving because some idiot can’t get the door open, though.”

No sooner than he had spoken did the door fly off its hinges with a loud bang. A heavily armored man stepped into the room, curls of yellow magic swirling off his body. He froze as he spotted the beheaded man at Lee’s feet, then let out a furious snarl.

“You bastards. You’ve killed Bryan!”

“And you tried to kill us,” Noah said with a shrug. “I’m not seeing the issue here.”

He blasted the man with a bolt of lightning. He was wearing armor, so Noah was pretty sure that should have been the end of it. To his surprise, his magic slammed into the man and swirled around his body, gathering in his hands before forming into a glowing longsword made of electric energy.

“Huh,” Noah said. “Didn’t see that coming.”

“You aren’t the first to try lightning against me,” the man growled. “My name is Bryorn, brother of Bryan. You will–”

A loud clang echoed through the room as Lee’s axe bounced of Bryorn’s helm, cutting his speech off. The axe clattered to the ground and Lee lowered her hand sheepishly. She’d tossed it across the room to hit Bryorn.

“Let me finish!” Bryorn screamed, thrusting the sword toward Lee. A bolt of lightning leapt from its tip, and Lee leapt to the side to avoid getting fried. Two more bolts followed the first, but Lee managed to weave out of the way of both of them.

Moxie’s vines tore across the ground, reaching for Bryorn. He threw his head back, letting out another furious scream. A wave of electric energy ripped across the ground, blackening and killing Moxie’s vines.

Calling on Natural Disaster and unleashing his own wave of lightning, Noah stepped in front of Moxie and Lee. The two walls of magic slammed into each other at the center of the room, cracking and popping furiously.

Noah’s magic won. It shoved through Bryorn’s, coursing toward the armored man like a river. He thrust his hands forward, and the lighting leapt up from the ground, coursing into his gauntlet and vanishing.

The sword in his hand lit even brighter.

“That’s an annoying bit of magic,” Noah said. “How are you stealing my energy? Your Rune is clearly weaker than mine.”

“You expect me to answer that?” Bryorn snorted. “I’ll never tell you, vile murderer.”

“You can’t call us murderers right after sending assassins after Lee,” Noah said, snapping his fingers. The ground beneath his feet cracked, and a wave of spikes erupted in a line between him and Bryorn. They shattered against his armor but shoved him back into the wall with a grunt.

“She deserved death for what she did,” Bryorn snarled. He smashed through the spikes and stepped forward, whipping a bolt of lightning at Noah.

Noah pulled a wall of stone up before himself, and the bolt sank into it harmlessly. He shattered the rock with a roar, sending it flying forward in a barrage of large spikes. They smashed against Bryorn with a series of loud clangs, but none of them even seemed to so much as dent his armor.

Bryorn threw his head back and let out another roar – he was clearly fond of those. Energy roared across his body, forming into a crackling yellow cape. A plume sprouted from the top of his helm, and the smell of ozone filled the air.

“You think he practiced that?” Lee whispered.

“Probably.” Noah scrunched his nose. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a way to kill this asshole?”

Lee shook her head. “Not a special one. Smack him until something breaks?”

Noah glanced to Moxie, who shook her head as well. Noah sighed.

Looks like this one might be annoying. He sounds like an idiot, but we haven’t even scratched him. This guy is actually a real fighter.

Byrorn pointed his blade at Noah’s throat. “Come, then. You will fall at my hand.”

“You really should have found a different career path,” Noah said, drawing energy from Natural Disaster’s dwindling reserves. “Your talents are wasted. You’d be much better off in a theatre troupe.”

It’s fine if I’m getting low. Killing this guy should give me a good bit more to work with. I’d just like to avoid using Sunder unless I absolutely have to.

“Your mockery will end with your death,” Bryorn roared, charging at Noah. He thrust his sword, sending a wave of violent lightning ripping outward.

“No, it won’t.” Noah thrust his hands into the air, ripping a huge wall of stone up from the ground. Their magic collided in the center of the room with a brilliant explosion. Energy roared past Noah’s face and a flash of light momentarily blinded him.

Bryorn let out a slew of dignified curses from the other end of the room. He hadn’t gone down to the attack, but that wasn’t fine. It wasn’t meant to kill him – it was meant to buy Noah a few seconds.

Noah drew power from Natural Disaster and a chill set in around his hands. If he couldn’t break through Byron’s defenses as they were, then he’d just have to make them easier to shatter.

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