Seven
 

Dull claws ran up his arm, digging painful welts across his bicep but failing to pierce flesh. Kon twisted his hips and threw the beast behind him and down the hill, its scream of anger loud as it bounced downward and off rocks. Sweat trickled in his eyes and his chest heaved as he sucked in great gulps of air as his body burned in exertion.
Corpses lay in twisted mounds around him, the weak creatures not a dangerous threat when he could confront them one on one. The issue was they were legion. They kept coming and coming over the hill, a never ending tide of teeth and claws. Kon leaned against a boulder as the next of the diminutive creatures came at him.
He snapped a kick up and out and connected with the forehead of the monster. Its head rocked back and fell to the ground with a whimper. Kon forced himself up and over it as it started to try to get back on its feet. A blood rocky was clenched in a white knuckle grip and he brought it down with finality. Bone yielded to rock and the creature spasmed as it died.
A rock hit his shoulder and Kon grunted in pain and spun around, wide eyed and frantic, as he looked for his attacker. Alice was staring at him with a smile as she bounced another pebble in her hand. Her axe was buried in a monster’s skull and she was drenched in blood. In the background there were over a dozen other still shapes, drawn by the loud screams of the small F-grade monsters.
“Keep your attention spread out. You could be attacked from any direction,” Alice yelled. Kon gave her a rude hand gesture and turned back to look at the rest of the monsters coming toward him. The mob was finally thinning, only a few still rushed over the hill and toward him.
He kept an eye out for Alice and tried to pay more attention to his other senses, but the first of the monsters closed in and he was forced on the backfoot. A rock whistled by his head as he jerked at the last second, and the monster buried its shoulder in his waist and they both tumbled down the hill in a sprawl of limbs. Its dull teeth scraped over his throat for a heart pounding moment, but momentum carried its mouth away from the vulnerable flesh.
“Don’t let go of the rock.” The thought repeated itself over and over as his fist creaked in pain as he held on as tight as possible. His free hand clenched at the monster’s arm, holding it close as they finished their roll. Kon rose up and brought the rock down in a series of brutal blows that finished the monster off.
Another one raced down toward him and jumped at him, claws extended toward him, and Kon hit it with his rock as it impacted his chest. The deadweight sent him back down the hill, rocks digging into his vulnerable skin and drove the breath out of his chest.
“You should try staying on your feet. It helps,” Alice said helpfully. She leaned down and over him as he stared up at her.
“Thanks. I’ll consider it,” Kon managed to half whisper as he regained his breath. Getting his feet under himself, he got upright and looked at the hill he had been battling on for nearly an hour. The fragile monsters decorated the hill, blood smeared rocks everywhere.
“How’d I do?” Kon asked, hands on his knees as he worked on slowing down his breathing.
“You realize those things barely qualify as rift monsters, right? Like, children could fight them.”
“There were a lot of them. I don’t think a child could fight all of them,” Kon defended himself.
“You have grit. Not some genius fighting prodigy. I can work with that better though. Hard to relate to someone who just understands fighting on an instinctual level rather than a technical level.”
“You’re meandering,” Kon said. His patience was gone, lost somewhere in the third or fourth time he had rolled down the rocky hill.
“Oh, hush. Start getting the cores. You’re going to need a bunch of them to develop your node.” Alice carefully handed him a tooth she had ripped out of one of the beasts she had killed. Six inches long and jagged, it was sharp enough that Kon worried when he grabbed it.
Sweat dripped down his face and back as gore coated his arms nearly to his elbows by the time he finished his harvest. The first few had been an experiment to find where these monster’s kept their cores, but after that it had grown easier. Cutting around bone was easy enough and the tooth of the D-grade monster split apart flesh with ease. When he finished harvesting the last corpse he had twenty-two of the pebble-like cores sitting around him in a pile. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
“Finally done?” Alice asked. She had removed her jumpsuit and was liberally coated in blood herself. Her own kills were disassembled and cut open, six fist sized D-grade cores tossed together in a small pile. She was busy building a tipi for a fire, the metallic wood shining as she finished stacking them.
“Yeah. What are you doing?”
“Getting breakfast ready. You’ll have to cook your own, you won’t be able to eat these. Too much residual energy in them for you to process. Go and grab one of those and I’ll roast you some meat while you start the process.” She pointed her finger at one of the less chopped apart F-grades he had killed.
Kon dragged it over as a rune appeared over her finger and a tendril of violet leapt from her outstretched finger and hit the pile of wood. There was a bright flash and heat burst out as red flames began to chew apart the wood. Black smoke rose from the wood and an acrid smell washed over him, making Kon wrinkle his nose.
“Grab those cores and sit down here. I’ll guide you through it.” Alice pointed downwind of the fire and Kon quickly obeyed, some excitement filling his exhausted body. Alice had stabbed a thick piece of meat with a branch and was holding it over the fire while she waited. The smell of roasting meat made his stomach rumble, but it was a minor annoyance that he banished as he arranged himself.
“Now, on the ship we would put down a bunch of D-grade cores over some fancy machinery and they would help process the energy and make it nice and clean for you to slowly build a node. Obviously we can’t do that here,” Alice said. She didn’t look up from her fire as she slowly turned her spit around to give her piece of meat some even charring.
“How would they process the energy?” Kon asked, helpless before his own curiosity.
“How would I know? Some fancy tech does it all. Now, hold all questions till after the lecture.” Alice harumphed and took her gaze away from her meal for a second just to shoot him a glare.
“What we will do instead is have your first node be a processing node. Which is a category of rune that focuses on rift energy gathering and purification. The purification rune is this,” Alice reached over with her barefoot and made a half crescent with six intersecting lines that emanated from the curve of the crescent.
“That’s the purify rune?” Kon asked.
“What did I say about questions? And no, it’s not the purify rune. I don’t know the purify rune. This is technically a rune fragment. All node runes are fragments and a fragment is a partial truth of the greater whole or something like that. Leo is better with this than I am. Now, no more questions,” Alice said, but she didn’t glare at him this time.
“Establishing this node will slowly purify all the beastly energy of the monster cores you’ll be consuming. Which will help you establish your next node and eventually your core.” Alice paused and glanced out the corner of her eye toward him. Kon kept his mouth shut.
“Now, you’ll close your eyes, breath deeply, and focus on the shape of the rune and its purpose. To cleanse the beastly energy of the core, and where you want the rune to be located.”
“Where should I locate it?” Kon cut in before Alice could continue. She sighed and looked heavenward for a moment as she continued to patiently spin her charring meat.
“Node placement is very important. Your body will be able to support four to five nodes before you need to establish a core. The first core and node network will be called a layer. Your nodes will overlap since they’re not really real, more like metaphysical representations of condensed energy.”
“Then why does it matter where it’s located?”
“I said they’re not real, like in the physical world. They’re real in the, they interact with your body way. Processing nodes are best placed in the stomach, lungs, or throat. You’ll have them all eventually, but the gut will likely be the best to start with since we’ll be eating plenty of rift monsters. So focus on your gut and imagine this fragment, with the clear purpose, and try to manhandle the energy to you stomach.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. I mean if you mess it up you’ll blow up, but I think you can get it done.” Alice pulled the steaming meat out of the fire and took a bite from it, hot blood running down her chin as she turned to smile at him.
“Blow up?”
“Yeah. Too much energy being focused in a weak body. Your mortal form fails and you explode. Used to happen a lot more. One of the primary driving forces for creating the machines we use now.”
“Oh, you’re messing with me,” Kon said as Alice winked at him.
“Oh, no. You’ll blow up if you fail to establish the rune properly. You might want to spend a bit of time and study that fragment and think about the definition of it and, even moreso, how you want it to work.”
“My intent will change how it works?”
“To a degree. A small degree. Standard procedure is that the first level should be based on a standard set of nodes and a core. Chapterhouses and the Orders they are sworn to each have their own individual blueprints and guard their discovered runes like dragons. I only have three true runes fully. Our Chapterhouse didn’t even have that, I won one in a wrestling match against some scion who was directly in an Order.”
“So each fragment can be slightly altered as long as it stays in line with its original intent?”
“See, you're catching on. You could use this fragment to be a posion purifier or be able to process nitrogen as oxygen or something. Especially if it was located in your lungs or throat. But, what we’re going to do is focus on getting you a powerful cultivation base, so we need you not to lose your mind or explode. So focus on the fragment, the intent, and start visualizing.” Alice waved her spear of meat and continued to eat as Kon stared down at the rune she had made in the dirt.
“I think I have an idea of why she wasn’t an Instructor.” Kon kept that to himself as he slowly began to relax and think of how to fully shift the intent of the fragmen to keep himself from going insane by monster energy. Or blowing up.