“Aargh! Kill that devil spawn! Kill that fucking goat!”

  Somebody is out there. Lights out!

  “This is ridiculous. You really believe that some unevolved brat could have come up here?”

  Water drips onto my forehead and trickles down my neck. I am just another stone, another stalagmite hidden in the darkness, in the silence, quiet and atemporal.

  “I have over 15 strength and agility and nearly fell into the river five times now. Some unevolved brat can't have come up here.” 15 what? Why would they measure their strength in numbers? Weird people.

  “But we still need to check. You know that. The sooner someone finds that girl, the sooner we can get out of this hellish place.”

  “There is another hole.”

  “Well, check it out.”

  “What do you think I am doing? It is way too narrow.” I can hear some rasping and scraping behind my stone plug. I hold still, fingers tensed around one of my new polished swords. “Another dud. It is just about five feet deep.”

  “Well, let us check the next one.”

  “Fuck! I am stuck! Help me out!”

  There is more scraping, something tears. I store the sword in my spatial ring.

  “You know what? This is bullshit!”

  “Yeah. There are thousands of holes in these canyons.”

  More tearing.

  “I’ll bet fifty imperial silver those bastards send us on a wild goose chase while they follow the real trail.”

  “Maybe someone found that girl already and is pretending he didn’t.”

  “Exactly! Anyway, this makes no sense at all. We know where she is going. Right? We could all wait there.”

  They know what? How would they know where I am going? Are they tracking me somehow? Maybe through something I stole. No. If they were, they would have found me already. They must know where the compass leads and that I’m following it. But if they know that, what do they need the compass for? If it does lead to a treasure, maybe they know the general area where it is located but not the exact position. Should I forget about it and go in another direction? Maybe. But after all this drama, I would like to check it out at least. I can still scram if there is too much heat close there.

  “Another goat, kill it!”

  Silence surrounds me for a few heartbeats.

  “Did you get it?”

  “No, it bolted again.”

  “Devilsspawn!”

  A smile crosses my face. Those buggers pester everyone.

  I wait until the voices lose themselves in the distance before illuminating my new shelter again. I need more tools. Who knows when someone will force me to escape in a hurry again? I need something to tip the scales. But what? Well, I have light runes. Can I create an invisibility rune? I sit back in the dry corner where I slept these past days and take out my sketchbook. That would be a game-changer. Soundless and invisible. I could be a ghost.

  How should I go about it? If my seal-sound rune makes me inaudible. Would a simple seal-light rune work? Let us find out.

  I draw one on my left forearm with a similar design, just exchanging sound for light.

  I let a bit of mana trickle into it to see what happens. A snow-white sphere swallows my arm, reflecting the light from my opposite hand like a mirror. It is a mirror. You can see your face in it.

  I feel like an idiot. I should have expected that. If you prevent light from entering an area, it will reflect where it came from. That could be effective in a uniform snow-covered region but pointless everywhere else. But it is the opposite of what I need. Well, not the opposite entirely. A surface can reflect, absorb, or transmit light. Ideally, I would like for it to be transmitted straight through me. Absorbed could be of use at night. It would convert me into a dark blob easy to hide in the shadows, would It not?

  Astonishingly, I have rune-components for both. There is an absorption component in the immovable mountain rune. I would try it out if I did not have an even better component, part of the eternal spring rune. It is called a forced-unidirectional transmission component. That can be dismantled into the transmission component. It is part of the eternal spring rune because that rune needs to drain heat out of your body without letting the heat in when it is hot outside.

  So, what happens if I create a simple transmit-light rune? It could consist of a feeder, connectors, the transmit transformer, and the light modifier. Very simple.

  It works! I can not see my arm anymore. I only see the cave wall behind me. There is a concave section missing in the white chalk growths. I can see the fine-grained, rusty-red rock hidden behind. If I move my arm closer, there seems to be a whole section, a hemisphere in the wall missing. The rune must create an effect in a sphere-like space. Like what my simple seal-derivated runes do. Why? The eternal spring rune doesn’t do that. How does it limit its effect to just the surface of the body?

  I found it. It must be the isolate-shape-solid-body component that is supposed to: “When applied to the surface of an object and delimitated by the corresponding limit runes or rune-components, creates a separate region in a frame or body of matter to which other rune-effects can be applied.”

  If I understand it correctly, it lets the rune differentiate between what is my body and what is not. And where I want the effect to apply.

  Next try: Feeder, connectors, isolate-shape-solid-body, modified by transmit-light.

  I activate it. The cave around me fades and then plunges into darkness. An unseen hand smothers the light into the penumbra of a starless night. Leaving behind a suffocating veil of emptiness, pressing against my eyes, unrelenting and complete. Colors, shapes, every flicker of light is gone. I grasp the slick, looming stalactites, disoriented. The water drips louder than ever before, echoing in the darkness. I channel more mana into my light rune. I can feel it swallowing mana like a drain. But there is still nothing to see. I am blind.

  The ground feels unsteady beneath me, uneven, treacherous. I stumble and smash my shoulder against something hard and solid. The world around me reappears. Well, at least I can see the hazy outline of a column before me in the gloomy darkness. Only illuminated by the faint light that filters around the plug I used to cover the entrance. I stopped channeling my runes. Now my light-sphere runes work again. I blink and look around me. What happened?

  I think I know the problem. A transparent body makes my eyes unable to absorb the light they receive, leaving me blind.

  Invisibility is awesome, but not if it leaves me blind.

  How do I solve this? I need to exclude my eyes from the effect.

  I need to create a limit around my eyes to cancel the effect. Fortunately, the chapter about the isolate-shape rune explains a bit about different limit components and runes and how they interact.

  The eternal spring rune and my invisibility rune use the distinction between a connected solid body or mass —the human body— and the gaseous, liquid, or unconnected solid of the outside. How do I add a specific additional limit to those runes? To make them do what I want, only where I want. I have no idea. It may be easier to create an additional rune around my eyes with the components I have. A rune that lets me exclude the effect of all other runes that apply to the body. The manual explains what happens when the limits of different runes enter into conflict with each other. For example, it says that the limits of the light-sphere rune cancel the effect of the eternal spring rune around the hand when they are used together. So, I only need a rune that does nothing apart from creating a limit to other runes around my eyes. A pair of simple sphere runes that generate disconnected spheres centered in my eyes. Not that hard to do. The light-sphere rune uses the circumference of a circle as a reference to project a cantaloupe-sized sphere centered in the midpoint of the circle. I do not need to project a big sphere. But, using the same principle, rearranging the rest of the components, and adjusting the size, I can create a circumference around each of my eyes that delimits a smaller sphere centered around my pupil.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  I carefully apply the mana-blood around my eyes, using the seal-light rune I created earlier as a mirror.

  It works! I am invisible, and I still can see. Well, I can see straight ahead. It feels like I am watching through two small copper coin-sized holes. There is nothing when I turn my eyes. I must have made some errors when adjusting the size of my sphere runes. It may be even better like this. Two floating irises are less visible than two floating eyeballs. In the reflection of my improvised mirror, they resemble two scintillating insects.

  Why does my seal-light rune even work when I am invisible? Does it create another limit? No, probably not. Why should it not work? It generates a sphere that intercepts and reflects the light before it can reach my transparent body. That means I need to be careful and test everything out. So I don’t accidentally activate runes that may give me away while invisible.

  How much mana does invisibility cost me?

  Alone, it doesn’t drain my core. Together with my silence rune, it drains it very slowly. When limiting the silence sphere to just around my feet, it doesn’t drain it at all. Still a bit high. I can use both effects continuously here only because of the high mana density in the air. Back in my city, I would probably have to stop and recover mana after a few minutes. Awesome, nevertheless.

  There still is a problem, though. I may be invisible, but my clothes are not. How do I solve that?

  Can I try to use the project component from the sphere rune to modify the isolate-shape-solid-body component of the invisibility rune? The goal would be to project the start of the invisibility effect to a few centimeters outside of my body.

  I draw another modified invisibility rune to try it out.

  For some reason, it can not activate it.

  What if I change the order?

  Still nothing. It consumes mana, but I can’t see any effect.

  I rub my forehead, frustrated.

  If I do not know how to modify my working invisibility body rune to include my clothes, maybe I can create a version of the rune to inscribe on my clothes and make them invisible. It should not be that hard. Let us start with my new boots. I need to exchange the feeder with a gatherer and include a regulator so the rune does not overload. And it can not lack a switch. Do not forget the switch. You need to be able to toggle the effect on and off. The last thing I want is to lose my boots somewhere and become unable to find them because I made them invisible.

  Well, this does work. Rune-inscribed boots, success. Next!

  Rune-inscribed enchanted mage-cloak. That is a challenge. First, I need to stretch the fabric out somehow. I need an even surface or something to tense in between. I take two dull swords out of my spatial ring and drive them halfway into the soft clay that makes up one part of the wall. That should suffice as an improvised table. Now comes the hard part. Drawing on the fabric without dragging it behind my pencilstrokes. All while applying a consistent amount of blood. You want it to soak evenly into the tissue. I am lucky that the fabric has a very high thread count, which makes it silky and smooth. I wish away the sweat from my face with my forearm. One last stroke and I am finished.

  Now, toggle the switch on and let it gather some mana.

  It works! I am an artist!

  I hope I never forget where on the cloak I inscribed the rune, or I will never be able to switch the invisibility off again. I found it.

  What about the rest of my clothes, though? The threads they are woven from are thick and a bit scratchy, which makes the fabric coarse and uneven. If the cloak was hard, it is impossible to inscribe that. Do I need to run naked under my cloak when I want to be invisible? Well, it is not like anybody will be able to see me. But that seems cold. And, if I need to scale a wall while unseen, I will not have any protection against scratches. Maybe there is something between the clothes inside the ring that I can use.

  I found something: a silken robe, a leather belt, and silken panties. Why did they have underwear typically worn by women? Whatever, I can use this.

  I completed the last item!

  Hey Kivi, why are you naked? Liar! I am not. I have invisible panties.

  These could be a hit if sold in some red-lantern district.

  Focus on the present. What else could be helpful?

  Can I use the immovable mountain rune as a shock absorber when falling from high up? It has potential. I paint a couple of them, one on each of my feet. There were a few big boulders in the big chamber, which I could climb and use to jump down.

  It works, more or less. I did not feel the impact in my legs after jumping from a bit less than three meters high to the ground. I just felt a faint tremor in my spine. That could be potentially dangerous. Maybe I should activate the runes sooner and feed them more mana. Let us try again.

  I climb onto an even higher boulder. There must be more than four meters to the ground. I watch down into the emptiness beneath me, illuminated only by the soft glow of my light-sphere. My stomach tightens. It seems way further down from up here. My feet are glued to the rock, rooted in place. Just jump! If you keep waiting, you will never do it. I let myself fall forward and flare both runes with all the mana I can.

  For a breathless moment, there is only a void beneath me. The air rushes past, biting my skin and tugging at my clothes. Gravity claims me with an unforgiving grip, pulling me down in a rush to meet the rising tide of the floor. For a fleeting moment, I feel weightless, awaiting the impact. I feel alive like never before. And then—contact. A burst of adrenaline. My knees bend instinctively to absorb the shock. But they didn’t need to. There was no shock. Well, nearly no shock. It felt almost like jumping into the water. But there is no water. There is only my disoriented self, a fish on dry land. I let my heart calm while the world steadies beneath my feet again. The rush leaves me reeling and grinning. That was fun.

  Again, I need to train this until it becomes instinctive. Who am I kidding? I want to enjoy myself like a kid.

  Okay, the immovable mountain rune is a hit as a shock absorber. What else could be practical?

  I think I won’t use the eternal spring rune. With all those sensors, conditional switches, and different modifiers, it is the most complex rune in the book. It must be a mana-sink. And my cloak already does the same thing. Maybe I could create a simple seal-heat rune, though. That could let me trick possible temperature-based wards. Do I need a seal-mana rune too? Probably not. I don’t think mana-based wards will work in this mana-dense environment anyway.

  I sit on the ledge before my cave, munching on dried mango. The moons rise over the horizon, bathing the canyons in a phantasmagorical twilight. The sky is a sea full of stars. The forest, a sea full of flickering campfires. Crickets chirp loudly through the night. It feels like they are scolding the intruders. I munch on another mango, letting the soft breeze caress my naked arms.

  I have finished my new and improved loadout. It looks like this:

  On each of my feet, I have a shock absorber (immovable mountain) rune.

  On my ancles, silence runes.

  On my left thigh, a body restoration rune. I may draw it elsewhere instead of renewing it in the same place once the ink fades.

  On my belly, the invisibility rune.

  Above my chest, a seal-heat rune.

  On the back of both of my hands, light-sphere runes.

  On the palm of my hands, light-beam runes.

  On the back of my forearms, another pair of shock absorber runes. To be able to block or parry a strike without hurting myself. Or to mitigate the impact if I fall while I am in an awkward position.

  On the front of my right forearm, a simple transmit-light rune. My first sphere variant, not the invisibility rune. I think it will come in handy. I could use it to see through walls or solid objects before entering a place or opening something. Let us call it a scan rune. I may exchange one of my light-sphere runes for it later. Once they start fading. I don’t need two of those.

  Around my eyes, two simple sphere runes. They don’t do anything apart from letting me see while invisible. Maybe I can add some additional effect later, like farsight. I hope to find the right components for it someday.

  And that is it for now. Well, there still are a few bits and pieces elsewhere. Impractical runes and leftovers from my experiments that I will just let fade. Now, I only need to practice until using all those runes becomes instinctive. I will practice until I can activate them under stress without confusing one for another.

  The only thing still missing in my kit that I would like to have is a rune to mask or suppress smell. Until then, I need to be careful around the groups that have brought dogs, even though I haven’t heard any barking in days. For now, I could start by washing the sweat out of my clothes in those clear water ponds back in the cave. Maybe I could get a mud bath. That should help.

  I bite into another slice of mango. The leathery tanginess dissolves into a honeylike sweetness that dances over my tongue. It floods my tastebuds with hints of citrus and peaches. It whispers of ripe fruits, of warm summer nights. A goat bleats somewhere in the darkness. The crickets stop singing for an instant. Then they chirp even louder. My eyes wander over the distant campfires. So many pursuers are searching for me. They are throwing so much wealth into the wind to try to catch me. No. Not pursuers, targets.

  I grin.

  I only need to train for a few days, sheltered and hidden in my cave. After that, it will be time to create some chaos.