Return of the Runebound Professor-Chapter 661: Investment

There was more than enough time for Noah to give Tillian some basic details about where to find him before the Transport Cannon pulled him back. He did consider if he actually wanted the Inquisitor tracking him down or not, but in the end, Tillian actually seemed to be of a decent enough sort.

Noah was also pretty sure Tillian would find him whether he gave the other man information or not. There was no need to make enemies. He already had more than enough of those. The Inquisitor didn’t seem to have even the slightest interest in his students, and that was really all Noah needed from him.

He filled the Inquisitor in on the basics of what had happened in the Damned Plains with the agreement that, after Tillian found him again in Arbitage, the Inquisitor would share everything he knew about Wizen and Orlen.

Tillian also served another purpose. Someone had to shepherd Eline over to Arbitage. The Transport Cannon wasn’t going to bring her back, after all.

If Noah was honest, he really didn’t have that much interest in taking in Eline. She’d been a brat and a half during the first time they’d met, challenging Emily and disparaging her during their whole interaction.

Eline had been a Torrin through and through. But then Revin had gotten his claws on her. The girl Noah saw now was nothing like the one that he remembered. All the haughty arrogance was gone — and there was an air of danger that hung around her shoulders like a cloak. Revin had trained her well.

Something told Noah the experience had been anything but enjoyable. But, regardless of how Eline gotten there, she wasn’t the same person that she had been. Noah wasn’t sure if that was for the best or not.

That might not have mattered if she’d done anything truly heinous. But in the end, she’d just been a bratty noble. Noah wasn’t about to leave her stranded in the middle of nowhere just because of how she’d acted in the past — especially when she’d more than paid her dues by getting landed with Revin.

And so, with some reluctance, he told Tillian to bring Eline to Arbitage and seek him out when they arrived.

Then the Transport Cannon finally re-activated and he was gone.

The return to Arbitage was… slightly awkward.

Everyone stared at him in surprise as they arrived one after the other. Noah was pretty sure most of them were surprised he’d shown back up without even dying just a little bit. He was forced to explain that everything had, in fact, been completely fine. Moxie had muttered more than a few choice words for what she’d do if she saw Revin again, but they all had work and practice to get to.

The group soon dispersed as the humans returned to their lodgings and the demons settled into the tower to practice their patterns beside Tim. Even Noah had a lot of work he wanted to get to — his learnings with regard to his Pattern had been massive in recent times, and he had no desire to stop now.

He had to keep going at full speed. There was no way for him to teach his students if they were getting ahead of him, after all. And, unlike them, Noah didn’t have to play things safe. He could screw up his pattern and blow himself to kingdom come as many times as it took to wring the secrets from within it.

And that was exactly what he planned to do.

***

“I’d never admit this, but I’m a bit jealous of Noah’s ability to kill himself,” Moxie muttered to herself.

She stood in the center of her sprawling Mindspace, having slipped into it shortly after returning to her room together with Noah.

Thick plants rose up all around her to reach for the sky. Her runes shimmered within the shadows of the jungle as if in wait for her to call on them. Far above, a brownish-green Rune loomed in the sky.

The Master Rune that Sievan had helped her create — Eternal Cycle.

Moxie hadn’t had much chance to test it extensively yet, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. Calling upon it already pushed her to the limits of her runes. She wouldn’t risk fully channeling it until she understood the rune better.

If she’d been Noah, she would have just barged ahead and tried it anyway. He’d probably have killed himself, but he would have learned about how the rune worked.

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But she wasn’t Noah.

And she didn’t want to be. As effective as his methods were, his path was sheer brute force. There was no nuance or calculated approaches. He didn’t have to worry about consequences, and that let him accomplish things that should have been impossible.

It was convenient. Incredibly so. Moxie had benefited from his help more times than she could count. But, as much as she appreciated his abilities, that path was Noah’s.

Not hers.

The corners of Moxie’s lips twitched up as she let her head roll back so she could look up at the Master Rune floating above her.

I remember when I was younger, before I’d fully understood that the Torrins were never going to let me have a choice, that I wanted to be a researcher. I wanted to study Runes and figure out how they worked.

Honestly, probably for the best that never happened. Researchers don’t live long. Not with all the Rune Oaths binding them to their family and having to test their theories on themselves. It isn’t an enviable field… but I’ve always liked the feeling of making a strategy to deal with something and then having it work out.

“Maybe I’m just egotistical,” Moxie mused.

It was the same answer she’d given Sievan when he’d asked if she wanted him to handle the creation of the Master Rune for her. Death was a domain he knew well. Better than anyone in existence.

She’d said no.

Creating a Master Rune from other runes rather than forming it from scratch was something impossible. A feat that nobody — not even Noah— had done.

And Moxie refused to just be some helpless girl that followed Noah around, getting his or someone else’s help whenever she needed to get stronger. So instead of letting Sievan create an objectively more powerful Master Rune for her, she’d asked him to teach her how to create one in the first place.

It wasn’t like making a rune purely from scratch. After all, she’d had a Broken Master Rune to work with, but that hadn’t helped anyone yet.

Sievan had obliged her. He’d told her what Broken Master Runes truly were. And, if Moxie was completely honest with herself, she hadn’t fully understood him. She still didn’t.

Broken Master Runes were fragments of a law. If Master Runes were the epitomy of a single, specific aspect of something, then Broken Master Runes were what happened when someone drew close enough to that concept to brush it but failed to stick the landing.

Not because the Broken Master Rune had been made wrong, but because someone else had already gotten there first.

They’re proof that only a single Master Rune of a single type can ever exist in the same world. Sievan hedged something about a greater universe, but I didn’t fully understand what he was getting at. It was too philosophical — and in the end, it doesn’t matter right now.

What does matter is that, while I don’t have the ability to create a Master Rune from nothing, I could repurpose one.

And I did.

It had taken a number of tweaks and a whole lot of wasted energy from runes that Sievan had provided. Modifying the Master Rune had been akin to redirecting a charging horse. It already had a direction it wanted to go in. Moxie couldn’t completely change it, but she could slightly nudge its focus until it aligned with hers.

Death was closely linked to the cycle of life. For all intents and purposes, it was most of it. Everything died. Most things spent more time dead than they did alive, and it was death that gave birth to more life.

And she’d done it. The rune might not have been the strongest it could have been, but there was no rune that suited her more — and even still, she had yet to let herself draw on the full extent of its strength.

Instead, Moxie had spent every spare moment she’d had testing the pattern she’d guided the Master Rune with. She’d pushed it to the limits to try and determine everything that it was capable of. Moxie had scoured every piece of information she could get her hands on. Her journal was full of the experiments she’d put her pattern through.

And now, finally, she’d just about finished all of the tests she’d wanted to try. Her pattern was far from perfect, but she understood it well enough to realize that she wasn’t getting any better just beating her head against the wall.

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There was nothing left to try, but there was still more to discover. And that meant it was time to change the angle of her research. Pushing the pattern further wasn’t changing anything.

But that had been part of the plan. She’d never expected to master her pattern so easily. Moxie knew her talents well enough. Patterns and magic didn’t come naturally to her. She wasn’t a genius. The reason she’d gotten as far as she had, to the point where the Torrins had chosen her to teach the girl who would have been their head, was for one reason alone.

She worked with intention. No information was wasted from her research. It might not have been the fastest or most efficient method, but it got her where she needed to get — and it made sure she understood exactly what she was doing.

From the moment Noah had first shown her just how powerful patterns could be, she’d started trying to figure out how she could advance them. They were too dangerous to just fling herself at blindly. She needed something that could simulate them better to get more accurate research.

And she’d found it.

Or, to be more accurate, she’d made it.

Moxie hadn’t been fully honest with Sievan. She’d wanted to make her own Master Rune for more reasons than just her own ego.

Some might have said it foolish to intentionally choose to make a weaker Master Rune just so it perfectly matched her pattern.

Moxie just called it an investment.

One that she was finally ready to start cashing in.

It was time to see what her Master Rune could really do — not just in terms of pure power, but to let her understand her pattern even better.