Return of the Runebound Professor

Noah spent the rest of his watch with his attention split in so many different directions that he ended up paying attention to none of it. His own Runes were a priority, but now Formations and Todd’s issue had gotten tossed into the mix.

Todd’s problem wouldn’t even be a problem if we were rich. We could just buy the healing he needs, or I could just go get a Shield that was so strong that he doesn’t need to dodge at all. Unfortunately, neither of those are an option.

Alas, no answers arose. The moon swept through the sky and headed toward the horizon as the sun rose opposite to it. Isabel and Emily had returned to the camp several hours ago, but Noah had pretended not to notice them.

Moxie came out of the tent just a few minutes after the sun rose, her ginger hair sticking out in just about every direction as she desperately tried to tame it back. She noticed Noah watching her and narrowed her eyes.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Noah replied. “How’s Lee?”

Moxie shook her head. “The same. Hopefully we’ll see some change before the day is out, but nothing so far.”

Noah chewed his inner cheek. “Hopefully. I guess all we can do right now is wait and see.”

He covered a yawn, then squinted as the sun poked out from behind a cloud and stung his eyes. Some shuffles from the other tent marked their students rolling awake. A minute later, Todd stepped out, chewing on a strip of jerky.

Noah collected Lee, carefully slinging her over his shoulder as everyone started to prepare to leave. After taking a few more minutes to properly wake up, Isabel returned their stone housing back to the ground and the group set off once more, headed toward the Red Barren.

Noah kept pace with Moxie and the kids trailed behind them in a group, speaking and occasionally laughing in low tones.

“Moxie, have you ever heard of Formations?”

Moxie glanced over at him, blinking. “I know of them, but it’s been a while since I’ve heard them mentioned. Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering–”

“If they were useful for combat?” Moxie finished with a grin. “Yeah. I went through that stage as well.”

“Does that mean they aren’t?”

She shook her head. “No, I didn’t say that. It’s more that they’re really damn frustrating. I’m probably not the best teacher for this, but Formations are a way to get multiple Runes to work together at the same time, circumventing the limits your body has. Normally, you can only use a single Rune at once. With Formations, you fill a pattern with energy from your Runes one at a time, then activate everything at once, which simulates using multiple Runes at once. It lets you pull off really powerful effects.”

“That seems pretty damn useful.”

“It is,” Moxie said with a nod. “The problem is, Formations are completely different for each Rune combination. It’s kind of like learning a language to get the Runes to communicate with each other, but each Rune speaks its own, unique language. So it’s not just one language, it’s a new one for each Rune, and then you’ve got to integrate the languages so the Runes can actually work together.”

Noah grunted. “Yeah, Todd said it was a huge pain. And the Formations aren’t useful once you Rank up since you make them with specific Runes in mind, and then Ranking up replaces ‘em, right?”

“Yep. It takes a special kind of person to try to learn formations.”

“A talented one?”

Moxie looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. “A masochist. Most people that do Formations spend months figuring them out, then even longer perfecting them, and one Formation only does a single thing. They’re unique to the person using them as well, so you’ve got to figure everything out from scratch.”

Noah pursed his lips in disappointment. “Oh. I see. I can see the problem, then.”

“Don’t get me wrong, though. I’ve never seen it myself, but I’ve heard of how powerful Formations can be, especially at higher Ranks. If someone got a Formation that could have even three or four of their Runes working at once, they can crush someone just using a single one normally. It’s a huge time and effort investment, and it does take away time that you could just be practicing normally and trying to reach the next Rank, but I know they can be terrifying.”

“I see,” Noah said, rubbing his chin in thought as they walked. So Revin wasn’t completely delusional. That explained why Revin had asked if he was holding back to work on Formations. If Revin had any Formations, then Ranking up would render them worthless. It was a bit of sunk-cost fallacy, but it made sense.

If you know what Runes you’re going to have at the next Rank, could you make a Formation in advance? That’s an interesting thought. That would keep you from weakening yourself when you Rank up.

“Is there a reason you’re suddenly looking into Formations?” Moxie asked. “I’m not going to caution you against them as I never really tried learning them myself, but I know a lot of people have tried and failed to master them.”

“Remember that weird teacher from yesterday? Revin?”

“Yeah.”

“He showed up in the middle of the night talking about Formations. He didn’t seem dangerous, but he’s certainly odd. I’m also pretty sure he’s following us.”

Moxie glanced over her shoulder, then back to Noah. “Of course he is. Does he have some form of stealth Rune?”

“Yeah. I wasn’t sure if it was even worth telling him to stop. He doesn’t strike me as the type of person that would listen.”

“No, he didn’t,” Moxie agreed. “We’ll just have to keep an eye on him. Did you see his student?”

Noah shook his head. “No. Not since we first met them. Why?”

“Just curious. I felt bad for the kid,” Moxie said with a chuckle. “Then again, I felt bad for your students as well. Maybe we’re being too harsh.”

“Hey! Don’t lump me in with him.”

Moxie arched an eyebrow. “Just toss in a tattered jacket and some hair dye and you could pull it off. His reputation isn’t worse than yours given that I’ve never heard of him before, so that technically means you suck even more.”

“That’s just cruel,” Noah grumbled.

Moxie laughed. Lee shifted slightly in Noah’s arms and he stiffened missing a step in surprise, but she didn’t make any motions beyond that. Hopeful that Lee was starting to recover, Noah increased his pace to catch back up with Moxie.

The rest of their day went without anything of interest. The grassy plains started to turn from vibrant green to a gradually deepening dead yellow. By the time the sun had started to set, the grass around them was mostly dead.

Stretching out in the distance, just a few hours of travel away, were waves of sandy red dunes. They glittered faintly in the sunlight like a bed of bloody rubies. When Moxie had called the location the Red Barrens, Noah had been expecting slightly orangish sand, not something so bright that it nearly hurt his eyes to look at.

“Whoa,” Todd said, voicing Noah’s thoughts perfectly. “You weren’t joking about the red bit.”

“We’ll camp here for the night, then get things started properly in the morning,” Moxie said, stepping off the road – or rather, what was left of it. Once they’d gotten deep enough into he drying grass, most of the cobble path had been buried beneath dirt from years of disuse.

At this point, all that remained were a few scattered stones in the general direction that they’d come from.

“Is there anything we should know before we go in?” Isbael asked. “And what about water?”

“I can gather some from the air,” Emily said. “But it won’t be much, and this environment is going to be pretty bad for my Runes. I won’t be nearly as effective in a desert.”

The pensive look on Todd’s face told Noah that he’d had the same thought process, but in reverse. The high heat of the desert would likely make it a lot easier for Todd to generate fire, but the drawback was that a lot of the monsters in the area were probably used to the temperature. That was unlikely to make them fireproof, but resistance was resistance.

“All the more reason for you to practice in it,” Moxie said. She lifted a hand to her mouth and turned around, coughing into it as her shoulders shook slightly. Before Noah could ask if she was okay, Moxie straightened back up and shook her head, wiping a small smile from her lips and thrusting a finger at Emily. “And more reason to branch out as well. If you’ve only got one type of Rune, you’ll be unbalanced. Runes exert pressure on each other, but not when they’re of the same type. So, if you’ve got seven Runes that are exactly the same…”

“Eventually the pressure won’t have anything to push against and your foundations will collapse,” Emily finished, rolling her eyes. “I know. You’ve told me a bunch of times. But it’s not like it’ll happen immediately. I can just get some other kinds of Runes at Rank 2. I want my main Rune to be Ice.”

“Then get used to using it in environments that aren’t optimal,” Moxie said with a wry smile. “I’m not going to tell you much about the Red Barrens. This is still survival training, after all. But I will say that you won’t have to worry too much about water as long as you aren’t dumb. Just focus on what we’ve been practicing.”

The students nodded, and Isabel set about erecting camp. While they worked, Moxie handed Noah a sheaf of papers. A glance revealed them to be the dossier for the Red Barrens. He grinned.

“Thanks. Do you have a plan for what we’ll be doing yet?”

“The day will mostly be training against anything we run into. I’ll leave that bit up to you,” Moxie said, sliding up beside him and flipping a page of the dossier back to reveal a short list of monsters, each with rough sketches. A grin slipped across her face as Noah carefully shifted Lee to one arm so he could use the other to take the papers.

What was that about?

Noah scanned the papers and grimaced, Moxie’s smile forgotten. The first of the monsters was a scorpion aptly named a Stinger. Its description said it was usually around four or five feet tall, but its bulbous, shiny body and fat namesake stinger made it somehow more intimidating than most of the other things he’d fought.

Beside it was a much more reasonable lizard creature. It had a frilled neck and long, unwieldy talons on its front feet. According to its description, the monster was called a Frill, and it typically traveled in small packs.

Once again, whoever goes around naming these things proves to be supremely dull with their choice of names. Then again, it’s not like we did that differently on Earth. Half the Latin names were literally just descriptions.

The other two monsters on the page were the Sandray, which was the Great Monster of the area, and a Ray, which appeared to just be a much smaller version of the Sandray. If it wasn’t for the text informing Noah that normal Rays were about seven feet long, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart from the Sandray.

“Which of these do you think is controlled by the Sandray?” Noah asked. Moxie shot him an amused look and he hurried to add, “aside from the Rays. In the Scorched Acres, the Hellreaver had influence over all the monkeys. Is it the same here?”

“I’m not sure,” Moxie admitted, giving him a grin and clapping him on the shoulder. “That’s your job to figure out. It’s not like you’ll be at any risk, right? Who better to scout things out and make sure they are as they should be?”

Ah, shit. Now she’s realized I’m disposable.

The glint in Moxie’s eye sharpened as her grin grew wider. “What? Is something wrong?”

“No,” Noah grumbled, scrunching his nose and shaking his head. He adjusted his grip on Lee – his arms were exhausted from carrying her all day, but it didn’t feel right to just plop her down in the dirt. “Nothing at all. I’ll take a look tonight and see what I can dig up, but you’re going to have to look after Lee. She was twitching around a little, so I think she might wake up soon.”

Moxie started to laugh. Noah stared at her, baffled.

“What?”

Moxie just laughed harder.

Lee shifted again, and a sudden thought struck Noah. He tossed the papers onto the ground and pulled Lee back from his shoulder, holding her out before him like a cat. She stared back at him, her eyes wide open and an impossibly smug smile on her face.

Noah’s eye twitched, and he suppressed the relief that flooded through him. If he laughed, then he got the feeling that Lee would never walk around on her own again.

“How long have you been awake?” Noah demanded.

“Just a little while,” Lee said sheepishly.

“How long?”

“Nearly two,” Moxie started, then doubled over laughing again. Noah gave her a few moments to recover herself as Moxie wiped the mirth from her eyes. “Two hours. Do you have any idea how hard it was to keep from cracking for this long? She was winking at me while we were walking!”

Noah let out a heavy sigh. “Did the kids know too?”

“They’re much better at keeping things under wraps than Moxie is,” Lee declared. “I taught them well. So… when’s dinner? I’m starving.”

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