Return of the Runebound Professor

“I can attack you, right?” Emily asked, pausing to crack an eye open.

“Feel free,” Noah replied. “Whatever lets you demonstrate your pattern the best.”

Emily closed her eye again and nodded. She took another second to steady herself and drew a deep breath in through her nose. Letting it out through her mouth, her eyes snapped open and she lunged forward.

Noah shifted to the side, dodging out of the way of her punch as it whistled past his face. She whirled and sent a hook kick flying at his head. It went wide as Noah leaned back. More attacks followed it in rapid fire succession.

Emily had definitely gotten down the chaotic aspects of a snowstorm. Feet, legs, and elbows mixed in a flurry of strikes. None of them connected. Part of that was because of Noah’s own experience – he’d been in too many fights to get caught off guard by Emily, who was considerably less experienced.

The frustration in Emily’s features built as she pushed herself even harder. Attacks came faster. But, if anything, that only made the attack less effective. Emily was already avoiding targeted attacks because of her pattern, which seemed to embody the chaotic path of wind and snow in a storm.

Getting mad only made her blows even less accurate and easier to avoid. Noah dipped and stepped around the attacks. He paid careful attention to Emily’s movements and posture. The pattern she was using felt like it had potential. She just wasn’t bringing that potential out fully.

Noah caught Emily’s wrist as it shot for his face, then spun her around. She let out a yelp and stumbled, nearly completely losing her balance in surprise. She frowned as Noah let her go.

“What is it?” Emily asked. “I wasn’t done yet!”

“It’s fine, Emily. You were just going to exhaust yourself, and I think I already got a pretty good understanding of the problem,” Noah said.

Emily blinked. She let her hand drop and crossed her arms in front of her chest, the frustration clear in her features. “What is it? I’ve spent so much time trying to study the snow and ice. I mean, it wasn’t like there was an actual storm to look at, but I made small ones to look at. Why won’t it click for me?”

“I don’t know if I’d say it’s not clicking,” Noah replied. He held a finger up to forestall any more questions. From what he could see, the issue Emily was having had absolutely nothing to do with her understanding of her pattern.

If anything, she seemed to be quite on top of it. Moxie’s fears that Emily was on the wrong track were mercifully wrong. The problem seemed to be that Emily’s pattern was just so chaotic that it was difficult to be effective.

She was wasting an enormous amount of energy and only a small portion of her attacks even had a chance of ever landing. It was basically a pattern that relied fully on overwhelming her opponent or getting a lucky strike in.

And you can only overwhelm an opponent that you’re evenly matched with or stronger than. Emily doesn’t need an ability that lets her win fights she should be able to win on her own. The pattern should be an edge that pushes her ahead.

“What is it?” Emily asked desperately, unable to contain herself any longer. “Can’t you tell me something? What am I doing wrong?”

“Nothing,” Noah replied. “That’s why this is difficult.”

“Nothing?” Emily stared at him in befuddlement. “Are you just trying to make me feel better or something? I can kind of match up against Isabel, but only just barely. Her pattern is so much better than mine. I have to be screwing something up.”

“I think the issue is with the pattern itself,” Noah said. He caught himself and coughed into a fist. “Sorry, that was poorly worded. It’s not that the pattern is bad or anything. It’s that I think you might be using it wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

Noah sat down on the grass and crossed his legs. After a second, Emily did the same. She stuck her arms out behind her and leaned back as she watched Noah with an expectant look.

“Let’s say you and Isabel were perfectly matched, okay?” Noah asked.

“We aren’t. She wins literally every fight that she tries in. She went easy on me a few times, but that was because she felt bad.”

“It’s a hypothetical.”

Emily shrugged. “Okay.”

“So, let’s say you each have 100 units of power to work with,” Noah said. “The power is perfectly equivalent, since no pattern should be better than another.”

Emily nodded for him to continue.

“When you and Isabel have a serious fight, you both use all your energy. Isabel spends all one hundred on attacks that are all intentionally directed to win the fight. That works for her because her pattern is concentrated into her sword and she’s focused on every individual attack as a portion of her pattern.”

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“Yeah. It’s really strong.”

“Exactly,” Noah said. “But right now, your pattern spends energy attacking… well, everywhere. I feel like less than ten or twenty percent of your strikes are actually something that threatens me. If I was fighting really seriously, I could ignore even more of them. A glancing blow to the shoulder is a worthwhile trade if I pay you back with one to the heart.”

Emily’s brow furrowed and Noah remained silent to let her think. To Emily’s credit, it only took her a few seconds to realize what he was saying. She leaned forward and picked at some of the grass before her with a frown.

“Shit. You’re saying I can’t beat Isabel because she’s using all her energy to attack me while I’m basically only using a small portion of mine back at her?”

“Yeah. If you were fighting a whole horde of enemies, it would be different. You’d need to be able to attack in every single direction at a rapid pace. Your pattern, as it stands now, would be perfect for that.”

“That’s not really a common scenario, though.” Emily pulled up another blade of grass. She pushed it into a ball in her palm and squeezed her hand shut around it. “So my pattern is functionally useless.”

“I wouldn’t say that. I think it would be more accurate to say it was useless right now.”

Emily burst into laughter. Noah blinked in surprise. That wasn’t the response he’d been expecting to get. Shaking her head, Emily tossed the ball of grass to the side and gathered herself.

“At least you’re honest about it,” Emily said. “I prefer that to just being told everything will be fine if I try hard enough. How do I get past the whole right now part, then? What do I have to do?”

“Not much, actually. The big problem is that your pattern is ill suited toward hand-to-hand combat,” Noah said. “Fortunately, patterns are only the first step. Just because something doesn’t work now doesn’t mean it’ll be completely useless once you start adding magic.”

“So I’ll catch up to Isabel once I use magic?” Emily asked.

Noah waggled a hand back and forth in the air. “I don’t want to promise that. There’s no guarantee your pattern suddenly becomes useful the instant you start sticking power into it. But I know it can become useful. It’s going to be about how creative you can be with your powers and your pattern. And, if you can’t find a way to make them mesh, then you’ll have to find a new pattern and start over.”

Emily chewed her lower lip. She looked back down to the grass. Neither of them spoke for several seconds. There was no reason to press Emily any further. She was a smart girl, and like she’d observed, dancing around the topic was useless.

I’m pretty confident she can find a way to make a pattern like this effective. She just needs to find a way to really optimize it. I don’t know what that way is yet, but I’d be shocked if she can’t figure it out.

“How do I put magic into my pattern?” Emily asked. “Is that the next step? Can I do it now?”

Noah chuckled. “I figured those questions were coming. Yes, you can – but slowly. I want to stress something again to you. Using patterns normally is safe. Using them with magic is not. You could die if you do it without me present. Hell, you might even die if I am here. You need to be incredibly careful. Do you understand?”

Emily swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. That’s kind of everything with runes though, isn’t it? I can’t get stronger if I don’t put myself through risks to get more energy and better runes.”

“That’s hardly true. Noble families routinely make Rank 5s that haven’t seen danger once in their life.”

“And they’re horrible fighters,” Emily said. She crossed her arms and locked eyes with Noah. “I’m not stupid. I know what goes on. I don’t want to be some pampered brat that can’t defend herself. Moxie won’t always be around to watch over me. I want to be able to defend myself. And, to do that, I need to be strong.”

Noah nodded. He rose to his feet and held his hand out. Emily studied it for a second before reaching out and letting him pull her up to her feet.

“Then I’ll do everything I can to help you fulfill that goal,” Noah said. “And I figured you’d want as much, which is why I pulled you aside first. Before we get started adding magic to patterns, I need you to try to think on why.”

“Why what?”

“Why are we adding magic,” Noah said. “What is it that magic will do to your pattern? What do you want it to do? Think on how it will take the pattern and optimize it so that it can capitalize on its differences instead of suffering from them.”

Emily nodded sagely. Then she frowned. “How?”

“If I knew the answer to that, I would have told you already,” Noah said with a laugh. “That answer is entirely up to you. If it were me, I’d probably try to find a way to use less energy on the attacks that didn’t hit. I don’t exactly know how I’d do that, though.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. If I use less energy, I can afford to miss all those attacks, right? So then I’d be able to keep the current pattern. But… how do you have an attack that doesn’t use energy until you know it’s connected?”

“That’s the hard part. Just keep thinking on that. Now that it’s in your mind, we can get started with the absolute basics. And remember – no practicing this on your own.”

“Or I die. I remember,” Emily said.

“Good,” Noah said with a nod. He paused and pursed his lips. “The remembering part, not the dying one. Now, focus on your pattern again. Whenever you’re ready, start it again. Then let a tiny amount of energy start flowing from your Rune and into your motions. It’s going to be really slow, but don’t try to push it at all, even if you feel resistance. Understood?”

“Yeah.”

Emily lowered into a fighting stance and Noah’s domain shifted around her. He still wasn’t great at controlling it, but he pulled the aura away from Emily gently. He left a very thin layer of it around her to repress any power she used.

She slowed her breathing and closed her eyes to center herself again. Then she burst into motion, trickles of magic tickling Noah’s domain as they entered her movements. It was so subtle that anyone who hadn’t been paying attention would have missed it – but Noah was paying attention.

Tiny motes of crystalline energy swirled off Emily’s fists. It wasn’t doing anything quite yet, but it wasn’t clashing with her. Noah’s lips parted in a grin. This was the first time his theory had been proven.

Emily was channeling magic through her pattern. It might have been a miniscule amount of it, but she’d done it. His student – who had only been practicing for a short time – had transformed her very motions into the beginnings of a Formation.

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