Runeblade B3 Chapter 362: Obstinance, pt. 10

Kaius took another plodding step. He was halfway to the next obstacle — what one was it again?

Seventy-first? Ninety-eighth? It was hard to rember exactly — buried beneath the knowledge of how to pass it as it was.

He felt distant — absorbed in awareness. An understanding of his own mind, and the world around him.

mory had long beco an abstract thing — layering again and again and again as each run was optimised; closed in on the point they may as well have been the sa mory.

He took another step — two more.

It felt like he was watching over his own shoulder, thick wool wrapped around his brain.

It was ti.

Kaius burst into motion, twisting to the side as he took another step. A red crackling lance the slled of anger and passionate violence connected ceiling to floor — just skirting past his chest.

The beam ripped down the course, boring a clean slice through the stone floor as it went.

He bent again, taking another step. More cutting red magic missed him by a hair.

Every step he advanced, he twisted, jumped, and spun — dancing to a tune that had been carved into his bones.

Everything blurred together, mashed into so conglorate where every death and every run beca a singular whole — divergent only for the briefest flashes right at the end, when he encountered sothing new.

The novelty never lasted; every challenge mapped, rembered and bested.

So mories lasted days, others only hours. It was hard to place each one — which went where, and what happened first.

It seed inconsequential under the strain of ntis. The awareness. The insight into every fleeting thought, every layered mory.

At least the ti it took to get to sothing new was getting quicker — yet even that saving grace fell flat as he hopped upwards, a red beam slicing under his feet. It was overshadowed by the weight of mory — and the knowledge that every new obstacle was taking more and more from him to pass.

They just took so much of him to map out — were so much more detailed. Keeping it all in mind, when so many experiences were so similar, was stretching him — forcing him to push against the limits of his own mind.

It was a swamp. A mire that sapped at him.

Truly, each obstacle would be impossible for soone to survive without foreknowledge now. Complex, three dinsional tests of physicality, where anything less than perfect movent and adherence to a lone path of safety lead to him being annihilated faster than he could blink.

Ripping blades that sward like mayflies, flying so fast they were only a blur — leaving gaps strides wide that he sohow had to navigate. Pitchblack tunnels that erupted with poisoned spikes at random, forcing him to Shunt between isolated pockets of safety. Dangling threads so thin they cut him as easily as any blade, drifting in an ever changing breeze — sothing he had to navigate while desperately clinging to the ceiling on handholds no bigger than a pebble.

It was a tribulation from which he had no escape.

No escape other than true death, at least — his Will was not so weak. Not now, not ever.

For all of his fugue, for all of his exhaustion, Kaius continued to refine himself. Deep within him, The Veteran’s Edge shone like the sun. A burning pillar that revealed to him the way — cut him a path through the gloom.

That Authority — it seeped into everything. Him most of all. A truth. One less externalised than Corporus; a weight that bolstered him — his mind, his thought, his decisions. It was the guiding light; the concern he held for his motivations and actions; the deanour with which he held himself; the Will.

The drive.

It wasn’t embodied. Not yet. He still had further to go before it sunk in fully — before he truly understood himself on a level that went beyond the implicit and explicit. Still, it grew brighter with every run, and with every death. His ti would co soon.

Nor was that the only realisation he’d had. With ti, and with death, he felt the way ntis nestled within him; the way it was inseparably intertwined with Corporus. Both were incomplete, a fraction of a greater whole. Where their Authority blended and weaved into sothing greater, he was starting to brush up against sothing greater. Sothing…foundational.

Neither fire was independent, and with that realisation the flas within his soulspace bent. Each aspect curved towards the other, lending each other strength as they flickered and flared.

An incomplete union. One he knew would not be finished when he finally felt ntis at its deepest levels. Animus, the final pillar — the one that still lay dark and cold — it was the key.

To what, he didn’t know. Kaius didn’t even know where these realisations ca from — when he had first pondered them. His dissociative cloud was too complete — a fugue that only left Will and action unending.

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Kaius kept moving forward as he lost himself in thought, acting according to the instincts forged in a thousand rehearsals.

The fog wouldn’t break him; neither would the death, or the monotony, or the burden of mory.

Deep down he knew the Truth. He relished this — he was not so numb he couldn’t feel the pounding of his heart, or the sting of a rising song in his blood. He lived and died in a trial of opportunity. One where he could finally throw himself at an unending challenge, and inexorably make progress.

Burden, fatigue, and weariness were small prices to pay — a natural result that he could accept with ease. The satisfaction as he climbed ever further was eternal.

He’d long since abandoned taking breaks — throwing his earlier dalliances to the wayside. They weren’t important, and the fugue grew with or without them. Oh, he still tried to grow through struggle and effort, but it was not his focus — not the fire that kept him going.

Besides, his skills had almost completely stalled by now, even with training. That, and every hour and every day where he wasn’t driving himself towards sothing new was a maddening itch. He needed it. The knowledge. The progress. The improvent. With them, he could push just a little further, get just a little closer to understanding the next obstacle.

Every attempt refined him just a little more — flayed yet another layer from his mind to reveal sothing eternal. An awareness that accepted the heart of things, both within himself and in the world around him.

Kaius slowed to a halt, abruptly taking a seat in a spot he knew was safe. Before him lay his most recent challenge, three pillars that jutted out of the path. Each one rose a full twenty longstrides into the air, and had layers of spokes that jutted out every two strides. Each layer spun, fast and violent, in alternating directions — and intershed with the spokes of a neighbouring pillar.

They stood sentinel in front of a sheer wall just shorter than the pillars themselves were. A wall, he knew, that would burn his flesh from his bones if he touched it.

Sohow, he had to scale the spokes. A problem, considering that every single one would hit him hard enough to crack bone if he mistid a jump, and so of them would kill him with a touch.

He didn’t know which ones yet.

Kaius grinned at the novelty, feeling out the potency locked away in Redoubt of the Speaker. He’d used most of his mana pool to inscribe it before the last obstacle — one he knew he could pass without spells.

Even if he’d let intentional training fall away, he’d never stopped experinting.

Hugging his legs, Kaius braced himself for what would co, running his mind over the looping runes of his hymn like they were a mantra. They coated his tongue utterly, swirling around his mouth until they nearly entered his throat.

A shifting rune appeared in his mind — a fraction of a larger whole that could not be contained in sothing as limited as he. Yet, even that faintest splinter contained multitudes; aning that strained him beyond comprehension.

Animal instinct and undirected desire drove him to delve into it, to pour over the endless shifting fractal and everything it represented. He refused, centering himself on the mory of every other attempt he had made.

His soul still flared, and his body quaked, shards of pain tearing at his mind as it was stretched to breaking. Mana poured out of his mouth, Redoubt of the Speaker stabilising him as he grappled with the concept of VOS.

Honing his Will, Kaius forced himself to focus — to draw down onto only what he could handle. He would not fall to so thing that existed on a level of reality he could not comprehend.

It shrunk to the barest of wisps — an insight that differed from his earliest, crude attempts to make use of its power. Sothing he had stumbled upon after use after use — found in a mont of inattention.

An opening. An expansion.

The air shook as light burned in his throat, the very air shaking from the power of his Truth. He tasted iron, and felt his mind bloom.

Insight washed over him, and his head snapped back as he gasped. Even attenuated, with the strain lessened as he learned not to reach for more than he could handle, the great rune still burned.

And with it, so did The Veteran’s Edge.

It filled him utterly, and stretched out beyond. Filants that used his senses as highways, absorbing the world around him — an Authority that seed to touch on everything that entered his notice. Thɪs chapter is updated by NovᴇlFɪre.nᴇt

With that expansion, he saw himself at the centre of the burning fla — the Truth of his will. How he approached and observed the world around him. How his thoughts, feelings, and intentions were active participants in their own creations — everything he thought of as him cutting a deeper rut in the world in a cycle of reinforcent. His mind laid a path for him to walk, and aided Corporus in enacting who he had moulded himself to be. In walking that path, his actions reinforced the conditions that shaped his personality and will in the first place.

A wheel that turned, building montum with every revolution. One that just might take him to the pinnacle.

Yet, there was sothing missing. The spokes — the core that stopped it all from flying apart at the seams.

Before he could reach further, the strain of VOS grew to the point where it felt like a red-hot poker was being driven into his eye, and his soul quailed in the face of a hurricane. Kaius grit his teeth, light shining through their gaps.

He pulled back from the revelation, feeling his soul pulse in discomfort. Redoubt of the Speaker helped — magic expended as it cleansed him with its soothing waters. The last runes ignited far too soon, leaving him feeling raw and battered.

Still, it was far better than it had been in the past. His practice at reducing the depth of his insight had been working. The backlash was still strong — if not for his current circumstances, he wouldn’t be comfortable making use of the skill again until he’d had a few days to rest.

It was enough, for now.

Partially restored from the strain of VOS, his soul burned strong; only flickering occasionally. It was not unchanged from the tribulation. Deep within it — so small he could barely feel it — the faintest of embers was refined from the experience. It burned bright and true, shimring with new found resilience.

With his mind closed once more, Kaius forced himself to relax as a wide smile split his face. As best he could, he cented the feeling of connection to his aspects.

A little more rest — and a few cycles of inscribing Redoubt to further recover — and he’d be ready to make his next attempt at the latest in a long chain of obstacles.