Runeblade-Chapter 283B3 : Re:Depths, Finale

Telling someone you had a hand in the end of the world was never easy.

Kaius watched Kenva process his involvement in the changing of phases. She moved from stiff and frozen, to her jaw flapping silently, to running her hands through her still-damp auburn hair.

Finally, after what felt like millenia, she spoke.

“I do not blame you for your secrecy—it is a heavy burden that has been foisted upon your shoulders. Many would falter and stall, where the three of you have pushed on and continued. For that, you have my respect.”

He didn’t quite understand the sentiment, the simple fact that she was not angry or accusative was enough for him. Besides, what else would he do? Sit around and do nothing? Pushing himself forwards to the next stage, feeling his sweat and blood run free as he clashed against the strong, the sweet taste of the first breath of victory—it was what he lived for.

Even if the world didn’t need its own Guardians, he doubted he and Porkchop would have done anything different.

Porkchop grunted beside him. “It is better to know and prepare than to wander the dark like a lost pup—unable to fight back against what lurks in the gloom.”

He nodded in agreement. Well said.

While their hand in the integration progressing had burdened him at first, the responsibility and opportunity it brought now filled him with determination.

It was a distant goal, saving the world—one even Ekum the Pale had said would take decades to accomplish at the minimum. For now, the climb, and the desperate accrual of strength was his main goal.

Something that a deep delve would do much to help him with.

Kaius hoped that his team would agree with his burgeoning thoughts. That they should stay in the depths until they had reached the peak of what was possible in the first tier. In his mind, the cap of level two-hundred could be a significant boon. It would give them time to shore up their skills, and pursue a wider range of Honours without fear that they would level beyond the bounds of what was allowed.

Besides, with Honours, and his and Porkchop’s natural stat growth, such a level should be more than enough to protect them from all but the most dangerous men in human settled lands. Even if he suspected that third tiers—and maybe even beyond—were more common than he believed, he doubted that the Frontier was a hotbed for them.

Perhaps the Dukedoms, and almost certainly the high-mana societies like the conclaves and deepholds, but not this penniless stretch of dirt.

As she finished processing the largest of his surprises, Kenva seemingly remembered that the phase change and a meeting with a god was not the only oddity.

“Wait—you said you got your class early, at the same time as the phase shift?” freeωebnovēl.c૦m

Kaius nodded.

Kenva looked flummoxed. “But that wasn’t even a year ago, how old are you? And just how good was that class?”

Porkchop cackled—a low rumbling that sounded like rocks being ground together in his chest. It drew a smile from Kaius.

“I turn twenty in just over a month, and Porkchop and I earned a Heroic for our efforts.”

“Goat’s piss!” she spluttered. “You shouldn’t even have your class yet, and you’ve already bested second tiers?”

Ianmus gave a wry smile as he looked up from the artifacts he was sorting through. “Well, he did say he had a Heroic, and frankly, between that, the Honours, and the racial trait they got from their bond skill, their stats are firmly in the territory of unbelievable.”

The ranger's eyes met his own, and he could see the respect held within them solidify further. She gave him a slow nod. He returned it.

“And what of after?” she asked. “What brought you to the attention of our dark hearted jailors?”

Pausing, Kaius focused on stirring the food in the pan—readying the seared meat in his storage ring—as he worked through the sudden surge in his heart rate as he thought back to the dark days that shadowed his escape from the Depths.

“We landed in the Sea, thankfully in a place I knew relatively well. Despite our isolation, we were not entirely alone—we were known to the villages that surrounded our home, and visited them occasionally for supplies. Threefields I knew best of all, having grown up there before I was old enough to handle living in the wild. It was close, and I thought it the best place to recover, and pick up Father’s trail.”

Old grief strengthened, sapping at his strength and thickening his blood like treacle. Slowly, with halting words, he recounted his return to his friends—the only others he held dear in the world. Their excitement and disbelief at his survival, and how they rested and recuperated.

He told her how his father had died. That he had passed on surrounded by old friends, while his soul disintegrated in agony—a final gift from their pursuers, when he was forced to use the strength of his shattered class to fight off the bandits and bounty hunter. How Father’s blade had been taken, and his birthright had been denied to him, again.

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“Like I said before, they had links to the Onyx Temple—though whether Old Yon knows who the man with the scar was, I do not know. At the very least, if our most recent captors did know of a Kaius Unterstern, they did not connect it with my reappearance.”

His team members had the grace and sensibility not to draw attention to the fact that he moved past the heavy topic quickly.

He pivoted to brighter moments of that time—his days spent catching up with Illendra, Huron, Yanmi and the others, and his insistence that they prepare for the coming changes.

Proud of the fact he had managed to convince them that it was in the best interest of the communities on the edge of the Arboreal Sea to band together, he spoke of it at length. Their need to form a new settlement, and how his changing beliefs had led to him and Porkchop sharing with them a seed of a new Dynasty—one he hoped would share its skills equally and openly with members of the community.

Looking up through his brows, he watched Kenva closely—curious to see her response. Maintaining hold over legacies was one of the world's oldest taboos, and even the Hiwiann were not except. They might have been more open about possessing them, but that was only because they were secured by their oaths, not because they were shared freely.

Thankfully, she seemed pleased by his honesty, and what he had attempted.

“I must admit, it is a nice idea—do you know if they have been successful?”

Kaius gave her a wide smile. “Yes, actually. They’ve relocated to a new site, around a low-level delve that they were lucky enough to find somewhere with natural rocky outcroppings to act as defenses. The new generation are already being trained, and from what I heard, a fair few people with legacy skills of their own appeared out of the long grass to add to the knowledge.”

The ranger returned his smile—something that gladdened him.

Kenva was shaping up to be a valuable potential long-term addition to their team, and he’d been a little concerned that some irreconcilable difference would have cropped up that would hamper their ability to work together.

“After that, we left—heading towards Deadacre. We wanted to join the Delver's Guild—both to secure the political backing we knew we most desperately needed, and to do our bit to help with the growing dangers while securing levels and coin.” he continued.

“We ran into this one,” he jutted his thumb in Ianmus’s direction. “Halfway there—about a minute from being eaten alive by a flock of giant birds. We managed to save him from his own stupidity.” Kaius said, turning to smirk at his friend.

“Hey!” Ianmus replied. “Don’t misrepresent me like that!”

Kaius laughed at the mage’s glare that followed.

“In my defence,” Ianmus continued, turning to Kenva. “The frontier was about as safe as it got before the phase change, and I thought I would be perfectly fine with twenty levels under my belt and an Rarel class. Alas, the world ended on my walk to Grandbrook while I was far from the roads, and I was forced to divert my course to Deadacre.”

“That’s life,” Kenva shrugged. “Most unnecessary risks of such a nature are only visible in hindsight.”

“See! She gets it.” Ianmus said, flapping his hand at the ranger. “But continue the tale—you’re the best at telling it.”

Kaius chuckled, and stretched to readjust his seating.

“Other than a hunt of an Irontusk, the rest of our journey was uneventful. We went our separate ways from Ianmus—he still wanted to try catch a caravan to the Dukedoms at that time—and headed to the guild.”

He paused, thinking back fondly on his first memories of Deadacre. There had been a few sour spots, but after spending a year in almost constant danger, being amongst so many people had been wonderful.

“There, we were hazed, and immediately ferreted out by the manager of the guild, Drorome. She pegged Porkchop as a greater meles, and myself as a scion, immediately. Gave us a few tips on where to stay, and let us know we’d need another team member to take on any real contracts.”

He tried to see if Kenva would react to Ro’s full name, but she didn’t. Though, to be fair, it wasn’t like he knew the names of every famous delver in the central plains himself, and Ro seemed to be a little more unknown than Rieker in anycase.

“We dragged Ianmus with us to our first mission against an illusion based spider, where we shoved him head first into his first Honour. Ro immediately became suspicious of our growth, and we ended up looping her and the guildmaster in under the safety of an oath.”

Seeing the ranger cock her head in curiosity, he continued. How Rieker and Ro had tested them, taught them, and shown them their failings. He moved on to the rest of their adventures—their fights against the boggling swarm, then a drake, and finally their brush with the biters in the Bonefields.

It had been an interesting time, in hindsight. A period of consolidation, where they had honed their skills, and Skills, and grew their wealth and resources. He moved to their discovery of Aspects—and the Honour they had received for it. Kenva had been particularly interested in the information packet that had given them hints on the nature of the revelations that aspects required.

She shared that she had already unlocked Mentis herself, though unfortunately had not been fast enough to be in the first five—a reveal that solidified his view that she was a good fit for the team. Kenva had still earned a good ability from The Movement of Autumn. Her Seed, The Fall of Rain, helped her to conceptualise, process, and intuit the motion, speed, and trajectory of everything in her sight. Handy indeed for a ranger who was light on her feet.

“After our final mission in the Bonefields, we were ambushed by a team of second tiers. They drugged us, with that same poison they used in the cells. Porkchop and I only just barely managed to kill two of them—you already know the rest.” Kaius said, pushing around the food in his pan before he leaned back and swiped the waterskin from the ground.

Ianmus snorted. “You’re ridiculous. ‘Oh, woe is me, I only killed two classers twice my level while exhausted from battle and half unconscious’. Seriously, Kaius, you’d be disappointed if you lost a fight to a god.”

Porkchop let out a basey grunt. “Give it a few years, we could take one.”

That drew a smile from Kaius’s mouth, and a cackle from Kenva, who slowly turned to look at him.

“Well, I suppose that just leaves one question from me, really.” she said.

“Oh?”

“What’re your goals? Truly?”

Kaius shrugged. “Climb towards the peak, see the world, fight and delve, wipe out the Onyx when I can, and do what I must to progress the integration.”

Kenva snorted. “Just an evening's chores really.”

“Exactly.” Kaius replied with a grin, before he turned off the heat of his pan.

It was time to eat.

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