Harvey awoke to a grating screech rattling the walls of the smithy. The old, decaying wood was full of small gaps that did little to insulate them from the sound outside. He took a sharp breath, frantically feeling for his slipsack until Aftershock appeared in his hand.

  “What was that?” Hannah asked, straining to look up from the cot she’d placed in a corner.

  “I don’t know,” Harvey replied.

  Skreeeee!

  The screech rang out again, causing the glass windows to shudder.

  Crawling to the closest window, Harvey looked out onto the main road. It was hard to see without the bonfire that had burned down days ago, so he activated one of the glowing runes on his gauntlet.

  “Is there something out there?” Hannah fretted, shaking Julian awake.

  “I… I don’t see anything,” he answered.

  Shadows danced as he opened the window and waved his hand like a flashlight. The road was empty, but that didn’t mean nobody was watching from another building. A third screech drilled into his eardrums, and he turned to the sky.

  Placing the sound was simple without the walls' interference, and he saw the outline of a massive bird silhouetted against the pale moonlight. It was impossible to make out any details, but it appeared to be circling over Veils End.

  “It’s just a bird,” he groaned, carefully pulling his head back inside.

  “A bird? I’ve never heard a Carrionwing that loud,” Hannah doubted.

  “It wasn’t a Carrionwing, unless the F Grade ones all evolve into condors,” Harvey replied.

  “Are we sure it was a bird? What if it was a…” Julian began.

  “Bat!” Harvey shrieked, diving for the door and struggling to remove the bars with his gauntleted fingers. Julian did the same, helping him remove the second bar before barreling out into the street.

  “What? Guys, hold on!” Hannah fussed as a fourth screech shook the smithy.

  “Where is it?” Julian yelled, spinning in every direction. Picking it out against the night sky was like trying to find a shadow in space, but Harvey eventually spotted a fleck of grey flying away from the Outpost. He had to grab Julian’s head and yank it around before he saw it.

  “Oh, good, it’s leaving,” he sighed.

  “No! Not good!” Harvey shouted. “What if it’s scouting?”

  “Shit,” Julian spat, sprinting towards the gate leading to the Undead half of the forest just as Hannah and Buttercup appeared in the doorway. Harvey took off after him, not taking the time to explain everything to the half-sleeping cheerleader.

  “Guys! Where are you…” she began.

  “Shoot that bat!” Harvey yelled, channeling essence into Booster as flames erupted from his feet.

  Why am I not flying every day? He cursed to himself. It’s the coolest skill you have, but you’re somehow always too busy to practice!

  Shakily, he soared into the air, using intermittent bursts from his hands to keep him from spiraling out of control. His essence reserves were draining like someone had poked a hole in his weave, but he was relieved to see he was gaining on the creature. Julian followed close behind, using his Vanguard’s Entrance skill to leap through the trees while leaving fiery rings with every footfall.

  Pure momentum blasted Harvey towards the bat, and it quickly became clear his rapid approach was going to overshoot his target. Letting the jets around his shoes dissipate, he started to wobble precariously. His body was not in an aerodynamic position, causing the wind to spin him without the aid of a steady stream of propulsion.

  Ahh! Fix it. Fix it! He screamed internally while only a helpless squeak escaped his lips.

  A few quick bursts of Booster helped him right the ship just as he got within fireball distance. Unheeding of the forest below, orbs of forgefire rained into the night, and he finally fulfilled his dream of becoming a bomber plane.

  Most fell nowhere near his target, but one managed to graze a wing just as he passed over the bat. Forgefire spread across its leathery back as another angry screech filled the air. Instead of turning to fight, the bat descended towards the trees and continued its retreat while weaving back and forth through the tree crowns.

  Harvey’s flight was nowhere near matching the dexterous creature, and it took all the focus he had to arrest his momentum just as his steel-clad body crashed into the leaves. Countless branches whipped against him before he crashed to the forest floor. Luckily, he’d managed not to barrel straight into one of the trunks.

  Out of breath and low on essence, he curled to a sitting position just as Buttercup stormed past him. His ribs ached while his lungs screamed for him to rest, but he scrambled after the fleeing buck.

  Julian’s flaming silhouette appeared high above the trees every few seconds, but the bat was having no trouble veering out of reach of his swings. Harvey’d hoped his forgefire would be enough to put a hole in one of its wings, but the glowing red-orange flame had already been reduced to a trail of smoke.

  In the end, it was Hannah who bore a hole through its leathery hide. Each arrow went straight through, and by the fourth, it wasn’t able to stay in the sky. It too came crashing down, leaves and branches whipping across its skin as the massive body slammed into a tree trunk with a dull thud.

  At least I’m better at falling. Harvey thought as he rushed towards Hannah and the fallen beast. Before it could struggle, a fifth arrow pinned it to the trunk, and the crystal arrow of her weakest Critical Mass appeared.

  Boom!

  Flesh and leather splattered over the ground as its torso exploded, leaving a massive hole through its center.

  “Good job,” Harvey gasped, leaning against another tree as he struggled to catch his breath.

  “Thanks, now are you going to tell me what this thing is?” she asked.

  “Don’t you remember?” Julian asked, healing fire spreading through the clearing where he landed next to the corpse. “This is one of those bats from the vision. The ones who were scouting ahead with the spiders.”

  “Ok, what about that means we need to chase it through the forest in the middle of the night like our lives depend on it?” she continued.

  “It was circling Veils End before heading back towards the Necrolords,” Harvey explained. “Best guess is those screeches were it using echolocation to map out the Outpost.”

  “Who cares? All they’d see is a few empty buildings,” she groaned.

  “Exactly, and who’s going to send an army to investigate a few empty buildings?” Harvey asked. “If they find out Veils End is empty, all the traps we’ve been setting won’t mean a thing.”

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  “The good thing is we’ll always hear them coming,” Julian said. “If we hear one of those things again, we have to hunt it down. No matter what.”

  “I’m too tired to care right now,” she groaned, rubbing her eyes. “Explain that all again in the morning.”

  Harvey grabbed what was left of the bat and tossed it in a slipsack. He never knew if he’d need something for an inscription down the road, so he’d gotten in the habit of hoarding every resource he found, no matter how gory or mundane.

  “When did we stop sleeping in shifts?” Harvey asked as he and Julian walked back together. Hannah and Buttercup were long gone, the deer having sprinted away the second she confirmed they were safe.

  “I don’t know. I guess when the walls were built?” Julian answered. “Veils End was a lot safer when it was more than just the three of us.”

  It had only been a few hours since they’d gone to bed, but Harvey had too much adrenaline from his crash course in flying through the midnight air. Offering to take the first watch, he grabbed his ink, Julian’s sword, and the spare antler that would become the hilt of Hannah’s blade before taking a seat near a window. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust to the moonlight, but once he felt comfortable, he got to work on the first inscription.

  In practice, his healing array wouldn’t be that different from a lightning burst array. Functionally, they were doing the same things. Extracting essence from the crystal embedded in the pommel, running it through a transmutation rune to change the nature of the essence, and then releasing the concentrated energy through a burst rune. The hardest step would be changing the raw essence into the vital energy normally provided by a health potion.

  It was easy to see the runes he’d been using were some of the most basic, each serving an extremely basic function that was capable of enacting his ideas without the nuanced execution he assumed would be important later on.

  Right now, he was trying to speak the language of the system with only a few dozen words in his vocabulary. It was like going to a foreign country and knowing how to say "I like food" without the mastery of the language needed to explain your favorite dish.

  Any meaning inside the runes came solely from the ink and the sheer force of will bullying the System into understanding him.

  You make heal now. Harvey scoffed, doing his best caveman impression in his head as he dipped the extra marble antler into the ruby red ink.

  Unwilling to settle for the simplest option, he instead inscribed four separate arrays, adding a battery of storage runes before the final burst. Each array would siphon the essence crystal's strength, transmuting it into vital energy stored in the batteries, until a trigger rune that Julian could activate mentally released it all into his palm. Doing it this way would make each burst of healing weaker than a single large array, but have the benefit of four charges that would refill over time.

  The sun was peeking over the trees just as he completed the final string, and a fourth notification appeared in his mind.

  You have inscribed | Healing Burst Array | Essence Gained X4

  Each completed array had noticeably drained the essence crystal embedded in the pommel, with the fourth consuming almost all the essence that had regenerated while inscribing the three previous arrays. Each array would only be a minor drain on the crystal until it was activated, and it appeared the crystal’s natural regeneration was faster than the upkeep of the four arrays. Technically, that meant the antler could support a fifth, but there wasn’t enough room to inscribe one. Harvey kept waiting for the day his inscriptions overcame the essence conductivity of his canvases, but it hadn’t come yet.

  Not wanting to wake his tired friends, Harvey brought one of the elemental corpses they’d hunted down for him the night before out into the street, where he struggled to chop it up into inkwell-sized pieces.

  His body probably needed more rest before he made his next batch of lightning ink, but his patience was wearing thin. His materials prepared, Harvey stepped back inside and sliced open his palm anyway. Fighting the elemental's latent will felt effortless after struggling to corral the over-enthusiastic health potion, and his increasingly potent pool of Willpower made quick work of the chunks of metal until he’d refined his latest batch of Lightning Ink. A thick mist of residual energy from the broken-down metal fogged the room, and Julian sprang into action the second his eyes opened.

  “Fire!” he yelled.

  “Iron!” Harvey shouted, not looking away from the bottle he was carefully filling with the inkwell’s contents.

  “What?” Julian asked.

  “It’s not fire,” Harvey explained. “Just all the leftover gunk from breaking down the elemental. There wasn’t much smoke like this yesterday since the health potions were already refined into the resonance I needed.”

  “Phew! Old habits die hard, I guess,” Julian sighed, stumbling next to Harvey.

  “I’m almost done with your sword,” he said.

  “Mind if I watch you work?” Julian asked.

  “Actually, can you not? It’ll just make me feel pressured, and I’d probably start explaining what each rune does instead of focusing on inscribing them right,” Harvey winced.

  “Sure, no problem! I’ll head to the watchtower and make sure nothing’s skulking around. Mind if I nab my old sword until the new one’s ready?” Julian smiled.

  Harvey passed him the bloody blade and grabbed the steel tine he used to inscribe his lightning arrays. He could stick to the same method he’d used before – a simple burst rune that could only be used once or twice in quick succession – but he thought he had a better idea. What if instead of a few large bursts, the blade could be charged constantly and inject a small dose of electricity with every hit? Julian didn’t need a big finisher from his weapon. He needed staying power.

  Part of the rationale behind the switch was that it was hard to know where to put the burst runes on a sword. It was easy with a hammer since there were only two spots to choose from, but a sword could cut anywhere on either side of the 3-foot blade. The base of the array was the same, an extraction rune pulling the essence from the crystal before transmuting it into lightning. The trigger rune needed to be moved earlier into the chain to not constantly drain the crystal when Julian wasn’t fighting, but that was easy enough.

  The main difference was stringing together a set of contact points all along the blade. He needed the lightning to only release when the sword came into contact with a target. Otherwise, the array would burn up the crystal in less than a minute.

  Hmm, what to do, what to do… Harvey thought, staring at the empty output of the transmutation rune for a long time. Digging through the database of runes provided by the guidebook, an idea began to form in his head.

  What if he ringed the entire blade in energy conduits with strings of balance, pressure, and burst runes stretching out to the edge? The pressure rune would act like a switch flipping every time the blade struck true, making sure the lightning wasn’t wasted on glancing blows or incidental contact. Then, the balance rune would throttle how much lightning can be released with each burst, ensuring the arrays can be used multiple times over an extended battle. Then it’s just a normal burst rune delivering the payload.

  I’m going to have to write really small… hopefully my god-awful penmanship doesn’t screw this up.

  It took Harvey over two hours of intense focus to add dozens of nodes to the interlocking array. The first few were sloppy, but being closest to the crossguard, Harvey wasn’t too worried. As long as they didn’t restrict the flow to the later nodes, they could serve as his practice runes. By the time he reached the sword’s tip, his steel tine glided across the blade like a 3D printer following a perfectly modeled design. Technically, the entire string was all part of a single, massive array, so he didn’t get any feedback from the System until the last node reunited with the first.

  You have inscribed | Arc Edge Array | Major Essence Gained.

  Not enough for another level, but he could feel he was close. Just like in G Grade, Harvey had flown through the early levels, but he was expecting the rapid progress to slow to a crawl just like it had before.

  His legs wobbled beneath him as he stepped outside. Blacksmithing exercised his body, but Inscribing exercised his weave. Maintaining absolute focus while imbuing your Willpower into every rune for hours on end was just as exhausting as spending the whole day hammering away at the anvil. Julian and Hannah were sitting in the watchtowers at both gates, but they both came running when he hollered.

  “It’s done,” Harvey smiled. “I waited to inspect it so we can all read it together.”

  The others nodded, and the rings around Harvey’s eyes lit up as a screen appeared for all to see.

  “How can I get in on this little bromance you two have so I can get something like this?” Hannah asked.

  “I’ll work on your knife next!” Harvey laughed.

  “Whatever,” she groaned.

  Julian reverently took the sword once more, grasping the handle tightly.

  “Can you feel the inscriptions? There are trigger runes…” Harvey began as lightning crackled through the chain of nodes covering the blade’s interior. Moving back to the wooden benches, Julian bisected a second one. A crash of thunder joined the snapping wood as a flash of light erupted from the blade, and smoke rose from the wood.

  “Yeah, I got it,” Julian smiled.