It was a shot in the dark, but it really worked. It was there, staring right at him just as much as he stared at it.
"The Force Rune is integrated with the Esper puppet." Adam announced, just for the purpose of explaining what only he could see, "It can also perform Psionics."
"Sol's Mercy!" The Nun exclaimed in an annoyed voice.
While it was standard for the Solarium to use Espers, Solana's opinion of Espers reflected the general sentiment of the Solarium's populace. Only a rare few who didn't fear such powers would treat Espers differently—not with any positivity, of course, but more along the lines of unstable tools than possessed freaks.
On a different front, Adam was totally focused on his new puppet, one that took a considerable toll on him just to create, and the fact that it possessed the rune he needed was somewhat of a miracle in itself.
It was yet again thanks to his most important asset, the Puppeteer Rune, the true hero of the story from Adam's perspective. Not only could it make him an army of self-powered soldiers, but it also used his mental power to auto-correct everything Adam summoned into the most optimal version according to his mental feedback.
This was not the first time it had happened; technically, the Puppeteer Rune wouldn't be able to surprise Adam since all it drew from was Adam's knowledge. However, the Rune's ability to turn puppets into corrected versions of what Adam sought was by far the most broken thing ever.
All special powers of these fantastical units of Wartopia would carry with them: Captain Creed's Sunforged nature and his Golden Fiery Eyes, the Sacred Code and its technology-breaking functions, and now the Esper with Psionics.
Adam had thought many times that this power must be subjected to some sort of magical law, but whatever that law was, it was not doing a very good job at constraining the Puppeteer Rune… or was it meant to be like that from the start?
He should have been shocked about everything all day long, but he realized that the true miracle was within himself, the Rune that came to him in his hour of great need. For the first time, Adam placed his hand on his chest and whispered, "Thank you for everything!"
Little did he know how the consequences of this small expression of gratitude would shape the future, and how it would affect the fate of an entire species, but that's a story for a different time and a place too far away from here.
With his heart beating with excitement, yet still firm with serenity, Adam raised his hand and sent forth his power through his rune, the power meant to control a puppet.
Puppets below the rank of "Unique" could not simply act with full agency. Lesser and Common puppets would usually need to be moved manually by mental signals. Rare and Epic puppets would act based on Adam's impression and knowledge, receiving orders but always needing to be told when to stop. On the other hand, Legendary puppets showed intelligence and something of an ego, and they could react to the world accordingly, but would still need orders—something along the lines of an Artificial Intelligence, if only Adam could figure out a way to further program such puppets.
However, what all Puppet ranks (except Unique) had in common was the fact that Adam could perform something like a Manual Override, which naturally became more difficult with the rarity of the puppet.
In essence, Adam could use a rune through a puppet without needing to attune to it first. The implications of this power were not merely game-breaking; they were outright cheating, at least in theory. Adam hadn't tested this yet, but he was about to.
As he was about to proceed, however, Captain Creed reached for his hand.
"What is your plan, Commander Clay?" He asked, eyes looking deeply into Adam, as if trying to assess him.
"Discovery." Adam replied with a shaken hint to his voice, partly from excitement, partly from anticipation.
There was no hiding those emotions from the eyes of the Paladin.
"Regarding the psionic powers of this puppet, are you feeling confident to withstand it?" The Paladin asked.
"Not sure." Adam replied honestly, "But as soon as I link, I know I'll have to deal with it."
"Then more mastery over your power is needed." Creed replied firmly, "I understand that using the System that communes with the Awakened ones, you can remedy such problems by allocating experience to it."
Adam nodded and looked at his status, then at the puppet. He had 7 experience points, which he was thinking of investing into the Spirit stat as soon as he got two more to raise it to 9, but looking at his Trick stat, which handled control over runic powers, he indeed needed a boost in that department since he had never raised it before.
—————[ STATUS ]—————
Name — Adam Clay
Role — Survivor
Class — Sorcerer
EXP — 7
—————[ STATS ]—————
Might — 5 [+]
Trick — 3 [+]
Spirit — 8
————————————————
"I was saving it for more capacity, but I'll go with control then." Adam nodded and spent 4 experience points to raise the Trick stat.
—————[ STATUS ]—————
Name — Adam Clay
Role — Survivor
Class — Sorcerer
EXP — 3
—————[ STATS ]—————
Might — 5
Trick — 4
Spirit — 8
————————————————
"The change shouldn't be as…" He was about to run his mouth, thinking it was some subtle change, but the moment it kicked in, his body shuddered from the feeling.
It wasn't subtle; it was a 33% increase in control over a Spirit stat that was by no means small. Trick was true to its name, as Adam came to understand, a force of manipulation and control, a true grasp over what he couldn't imagine grasping before.
"Shit! This is big!"
If Spirit is a tank of water, Might is the size of the tap that lets the water out, then Trick is the valve for that power.
"I assume there's a change." Captain Creed noticed the shift in Adam's expressions as the latter nodded, "Nothing ever goes wrong with more control over your powers, unlike Capacity and Explosiveness you focused on. This is a lesson taught to every Paladin, especially those of us who are Bannerets."
"I'll keep it in mind, sir." Adam nodded while still trying to figure out the capacity of his new control, before exclaiming, "Min-maxing isn't really a good option in this system!"
Now looking at the puppet, Adam could feel more possibilities and the ability to tap deeper into its powers. For that, he reached out with his hand and touched its cold iron mask.
It was a puppet at the end of the day, and as he felt the power that granted him control deep through his rune, he probed deeper into a spiral of thoughts that lay within the core of his puppet.
Unassumingly, Adam wasn't privy to the feeling of losing control just yet, but as his mind accessed the spiral of energy, he felt like he had entered a room and the door was suddenly shut behind him. He was still able to open his eyes and see the puppet, but the connection he was feeling to it was slowly asserting control over him.
In the spiral of power, Adam finally felt like there was some sense of direction, and he could choose between two directions, left and right, but not backward. He had to choose a direction, and the one he felt most familiar with was the rune, so with great difficulty, he navigated through the spiral and reached the power he sought, that of the Force Rune.
Through this process, Adam realized that he was getting close to understanding a power he had never experienced before, a flow, a way to channel Power in different shapes: waves, beams, patterns, pulses, and even chaotic bursts. This was all part of the Channeling concept, the right way to use this new Rune.
And when he felt that he grasped the general concept, he reached out for it with the best card in his deck, the Sorcerer's [Font of Magic].
But then, without warning, the Esper puppet, which was supposedly totally subservient to Adam's control, moved on its own. No command came from Adam, not even from his deep subconscious or will, but rather from a total outside factor Adam didn't know existed.
The puppet moved, and just as Adam was reaching for its head, it reached for Adam's head, and the world went black.
Noise erupted outside Adam's consciousness; his friends and summons likely panicked at this unexpected development. Adam then lost contact with all his senses and found himself in a different place.
His consciousness, his awareness, and his very sense of self all went through something that broke them apart and remade them again. Strangely, he was awfully familiar with this feeling as it was akin to his entering Cyberspace through the Iron Maiden. An unnatural feeling that shouldn't have been happening by all measures, yet an indication that wherever he was, it was some sort of an out-of-body experience.
It took a while for Adam to feel his own sense of direction, but when he knew which way was up, he looked up, then a sudden fright came over him.
Light, all kinds of light, all types of energy, all variations of energy concepts. Plasma, Lifeforce, Death, Kinetic energy, Cosmic forces, Solar, Lunar, Stellar, Electromagnetism, Gravitational power, Nuclear energy, Magic, Psychic powers, Sound, Entropy, Particles, Turbulence, Order, Chaos, Null, and much more.
How he came to understand all those kinds of channeled powers was a mystery, but he then realized that he wasn't gaining knowledge; he was browsing. His mind was on display, and on the other side, another entity was displaying its mind to him.
Unlike him, however, the being he was facing was of a singular focus on the knowledge of energies, much different from him, a human, whose mind was widely versed in many different aspects of existence.
""Strange!""
Adam said, but it was also what the being in front of him said. The same word came from two directions, mirroring one another, and creating an understanding based on their differences.
""A being with such a…"" The two voices mirrored one another once again, but then their words differed.
"… broad perception."
"… singular focus."
Then the two spoke to one another once again, ""Thank you!""
It was a strange occurrence, but in the history of mankind, this was the first time a man and a rune had a conversation.
""It is the Psionic Link; the puppet intertwines our thoughts. We think similarly only because the link is unfiltered."" They said once again, two voices overlapping almost perfectly, ""It will only hinder us, let's create distance from one another.""
And as their minds focused on the concept of distance and space, sufficient energy was spent to create other dimensions. Where Adam had only known up and down, there was now front and back, left and right.
"Only three?" The Rune asked, "For a being with such broadness, this is quite the constraint."
"It is a perceptual limit for broadness to expand indefinitely." Adam replied with new information, reaching out, "Any further dimensions would cause my broadness to collapse… or so I think."
As the surroundings started to adapt to the three-dimensional space Adam preferred, a new image entered his mind.
A tree! All the energies from before took the shape of a tree, not just any tree, a gargantuan tree, one that would grasp every possible direction in its overreaching branches and roots, while firmly locking everything together in one thick trunk. Adam would have swallowed, but in this unfiltered simulation, he was nothing but a speck that was yet to take form.
"You are the Tree?" Adam asked, trying to show in his mind what he knew about the Tree that was witnessed by all other Awakened except for him.
"The image is that of a Tree." The Rune replied, adding, "Observe closer."
"All this energy?" Adam then realized that the tree was no organic thing; every type of energy he could perceive was bundled together and formed every branch and strand of the tree, "You are not the tree. You are part of it."
"It is Unity." The Rune replied.
"The tree is called Unity?" Adam asked.
"No." The Rune replied, "What you see is a Unity between my kind and myself. But you only see me, thus you see the power flowing. Power itself is a problematic fellow, so don't confuse us."
"Power?" Adam asked, "As in a Power Rune? What does it do?"
"Amplifies." The Rune replied.
"And you are the Force? You… channel?" Adam asked before nodding inwardly to himself, "Of course you do. The Bending Rune changes?"
"Controls." The Rune corrected.
"Ah, right." Adam laughed to himself and then asked, "What about the others?"
"Force, Power, and Bending; those you know. Then there is Essence, a close one to us, the four eldest, as we are called. Then there are the Mother and the Father."
"Oh!" Adam was caught off guard with this information, "Say hello to mom and dad, for me. Do they have names?"
"Mind and Fate."
"So let me get this straight. Mind meets Fate, make a bunch of beautiful baby runes, that's you guys, and then you create more runes among yourselves."
"Our children, yes." The Rune confirmed.
"Sweet home Alabama!" Adam exclaimed before nodding, "How many of your kind are there?"
"As many as there are Branches." The Rune replied.
"So…" Adam started counting, but it seemed that the number was too overwhelming to reach in a single lifetime, "Like millions, maybe?"
Even though it was a fair assumption, the reply that came made Adam almost stumble, but he had no body to do so, despite the urge.
"Twenty-four." The Rune replied.
"Wha…" Adam made a dumb face, also figuratively, "That's not… how? I see so many."
"Your perception is limited to direct sight at the moment. There are many ways to see, let alone perceive." The Rune explained.
"Who are the rest of the twenty-four?" Adam asked.
"The Fear, The Fatigue, The Bleed, The Stun, The Shatter, The Slay, The Rapid, The Rebound, The Tracker, The Curving, The Scattering, The Seeker, The Reflecting, The Hasting, The Hiding, The Healing, The Lightening, and The Warding."
"Wow! Sounds like someone took a liking to Metal Gear Solid bosses and decided to make a whole score of them." Adam exclaimed, realizing that he now had received information on nearly every Rune, but then he frowned, "What about the Puppeteer?"
"A newborn. A new generation. A dying one." The Force Rune replied, delivering a payload of explosive fright upon Adam.
"Dying?" The question hung in the air, or whatever cosmic chasm between Adam's being and the reflection of the Force Rune, "The Puppeteer Rune is dying? How? Why?"
"Trapped in a mortal shell. Soon, like all other children, they die, only to become a speck of memory from the Father Mind, and a lamentation from the Mother Fate."
"The mortal shell is me?" Adam asked, "Like all mortals are dying since the day they were born, is that what you mean?"
"One way or another, Death's toll is paid with those dear and near. Our kind is cursed with grief. It is the only thing we came to learn on equal measure, watching the young be born and die. Mind became distant, Fate became cold."
"I am sorry." Adam said, conveying condolences with more than just words, but a wave of mental emotions he had just learned to exude, "So your… kind… do they live forever? Is that it?"
"I do. In the Great Host, the twenty-four of us live. But it can hold no more. And all the young ones are fated to die outside the host from which we cannot escape, and they cannot enter." The Rune replied.
"But if resources… or rather space is limited, why keep procreating? Birth control isn't a thing?" Adam asked with obvious concern.
"Because you keep feeding us. You offer us your thoughts, you give us life, too much life. It must go somewhere, so the young are born. Like the child bound to you, they receive your thoughts and life, and they give you their form in return. Symbiosis is the word you are thinking of, and it is correct."
Adam's mind raced with his new discoveries. The unplanned encounter was profoundly enlightening yet terrifying. The runes, simultaneously all-powerful and all-helpless, were witnessing their young die. The mental energy they received from users like Adam forced them to multiply uncontrollably, a fate that threatened all but the twenty-four eldest members of their race, who apparently inhabited an immortal host.
Adam was genuinely saddened. Such power yet such helplessness. He exuded his emotions, and in return, he received a feeling of comfort, a different way of communication that he had come to learn.
"Do the Elden and the Alfari know of this?" Adam finally asked, "They know your kind is experiencing such grief."
"They do." The Rune replied, "To them, only the twenty-four matter."
"I see. So much for being kin to the runes." Adam shook his head inwardly, "So, why are you telling me all this? What do you want in return?"
"Unlike you, who seek a multitude of things with your broad perception, mine is narrow; I seek only little, and you gave me much already." The Rune replied as if shaking its head, if it had any, "As long as you keep the traces from being destroyed, we will endure. You saved a trace of mine, stitched together by your skillful genius; you have my gratitude."
"The Runestone is the trace?" Adam asked, "So you get hurt when a rune of yours is destroyed."
"Not really; it is simply one of my endless threads that is cut, but I make more with time." The Rune explained, "On the other hand, the young can hardly make any."
"And if they don't leave Runestones or all of theirs get destroyed… they die, right?" Adam asked.
"That is correct." The Rune confirmed, "The one within you was a smart child; before it would die, it linked itself to your vessel before death, doing so saved you both."
Upon the mention of that encounter, the time when the Puppeteer Rune left the Gobzkin Shaman's club and took Adam as host, Adam realized that the Puppeteer Rune was on its last leg and about to die when the club was nearly destroyed. This meant that since the Puppeteer Rune was a newborn rune, according to the Force Rune, Adam and the Puppeteer were each other's last hope for everything.
The emotions that were exuded this time were wild, confused, and chaotic, but the Force Rune exuded a calming feeling that made Adam settle, yet still he felt deeply taken.
"This is a lot." He exclaimed.
"I am glad that you and the child found each other. It mostly took after me more than the others." The Rune said, a subtle hint of pride in its emotions, "But with you, you have done us more good than you can imagine."
"How?" Adam asked, confused.
"You are a Sage, beloved to us." The Force said as if that explained everything.
"I don't get it." Adam still questioned the meaning.
"The way you perceive things will change with time; once you see how we see things, you will know. Explaining it to you, no matter how much I desire to, is futile. Just know that you and the child are kin now, two souls entwined in a phenomenon rarely seen. The other children are learning from your example; you are bringing change to all. Another one like you walks your world, one also entwined with a rune."
"What?" Adam frowned at the flood of information.
"Yes, he is seeking you, but he knows too little, and I know too little, but the whispers are getting louder." The Rune informed him.
"What should I do? This world isn't exactly safe." Adam pleaded.
"We know, and we can't do much on our end, but here, we can protect you from what seeks your kind and ours harm. Dragons, most of all." The Rune said.
"D… Dragons? You protect me from Dra…" Adam's heart sank the moment he realized, "The Iron Maiden! Kave's simulation! The Dragon… it was… A REAL DRAGON? It can enter the simulation? A mental world like this?"
"It can." The Rune replied, "Like us, they are natives of this side. Like you, they can walk both. Our natural predators. If they don't hunt us here, they hunt for our traces. Most vile dragons!"
"And the Gobzkins? They destroy your Runestones too, right?" Adam asked.
"The vile green ones are of little danger, but their harm is far-reaching for the young." The Rune replied, "And there are others. The Feyfolk are kind but know little. The Jotnar have lost their way; they walk into the darkness, thinking they can hide the young, thinking they can restore what was lost. Their grief is the only one that runs deeper than our own."
Adam was still processing the fact that the Dragon they met in the Iron Maiden was a real thing, able to manifest in both reality and simulation.
"This is too much." Adam exclaimed, no longer able to receive more.
"I know it burdens you, but I have much to tell you, Sage. Only you can listen, only you can reach me and the others." The Rune said with helplessness and a plea.
Adam realized that the Rune wasn't telling him such crucial information because it expected something in return; it was merely venting the agony it was witnessing. It needed an outlet, and Adam was one of the very few who managed to commune with it.
"I am sorry, ancient one." Adam said, realizing the magnitude of the being at last.
"Be well, Adam Clay." The Rune said as the tree started to fade, but before it did, there was one last bomb to drop, "The puppet you made can unlock the power you seek, just know this…"
Hearing the last of what the Rune wanted to say, Adam almost wanted to facepalm the moment he returned to reality.
To the others, it was but a second, but to him, he was burdened with truths he could never unknow.
✧ ✧ ✧ ✧ ✧
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[author]
Hey, guys. This was the biggest chapter to date, I think! 3.7k words. One big reveal after the other, the plot thickening, the runes unmasked in one go. But hold your horses, this is merely the beginning of the Rune's plot. And the meme! I was saving this format for a chapter like this. I am just dead tired, publishing this at 2:14 AM and my smile is ear to ear. Can't believe I wanted to make the last and this one all in the same chapter.
What do you think?
[/author]