Eight
 

Each of the F-Grade cores were nothing more than small chips of bloody red stone that fit inside of his palm. Kon sat next to his pile with his right hand inches from it as he gripped the core tightly. Unlike the D-Grade core which had ripped him apart as if rushed through his body, he almost had to work to get the energy flowing through him.
Heat suffused his hand and traveled down his wrist like viscous syrup as he breathed deeply, visualizing the fragment above his core as the energy slowly entered his chest. As it settled there in his sternum in a ball of warmth, the stone in his hand broke apart like crumbly chalk and Kon was let to grasp at nothing but cold air. Immediately the energy in his chest started to leak back out into the world until he grabbed the next core and started the process over again.
On the fifth core his entire torso felt hot, like there was a fever right below his skin. Sweat beaded across his forehead and fell over his closed eyes. Breathing had become difficult, each movement of his lungs felt like there was a monstrous weight on them that he had to move before air could be brought down.
“More,” Alice’s voice came from somewhere far away. Kon grabbed the sixth core and continued to stuff his body full of energy. Anger’s heady presence worked its way through his guts and infested his mind. Whispers and treacherous thought plagued him as he struggled to maintain the thought of the single rune fragment and the meaning he had for it.
“All she does is boss us around. We don’t need her. She needs us! Look at her, she’s weak, wounded. Prey.”
The thoughts swirled and danced off the interior of his mind and Kon gritted his teeth and fought back against their intrusive meddling. Alice had warned him that the energy could lead to some more homicidal tendencies. He hadn’t thought they’d come so quickly.
A seventh and eight core went in quick procession and now his entire body burned. The more energy he drew in the easier it became, a vacuum forming inside of himself as he reached critical mass and began to subconsciously draw more and more power in.
Nine and ten went at the same time, Kon grabbed both and consumed them in an instant. The effects of each individual core was lessening as the power stuffed him to the brim. Every pulse of his heart rattled his body as he became hyper aware. The blood flowing through his veins, the way the air grated down his trachea, the wet humidity pressing against his skin, individual beads of sweat that rolled down his back.
“Removing the monstrous taint on the rift energy, removing the monstrous taint on rift energy, removing the monstrous taint,” Kon’s detailed thoughts were breaking down as he tried to form the rune fragment, but it wouldn’t latch.
Eleven and twelve added more weight as his body was starting to burst, a bloating sensation as if he had eaten too much. But across every part of his body. His head was moments away from splitting apart, but his hand was grasping for the next set of cores. Distant sounds came to him, muffled as if there was cotton in his ears.
“It’s not working. I need to find an intent that works for me. It’s to clean the monstrous energy, but what the hell does that even mean?” Kon waffled back and forth as cores thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen, were added to the growing mass of energy inside of him.
“It’s not the purify rune, but a fragment of one. One that removed impurities from the world. Only a fragment though. Maybe my intent is too wide. To cleanse all the monstrous taint? What about separating it?”
“To filter energy,” that was all Kon thought of. Not of removing the taint, purifying it, but just filtering it away. The rune he visualized had been dark, identical to what Alice had carved into the ground with the foot of her toe. Now it blazed to life with red-gold energy and he felt the rush of all the energy he had accumulated in his body rush downard.
He grabbed the remaining cores as the sudden loss of energy made him feel empty and depleted. The cores drained away instantly, turning to dust in his hands, and for a split second he was rebalanced. Then that energy was sucked away too. It was enough.
A cramp doubled him over and he gagged as bile raced up his throat. His eyes flew open and he grabbed the ground with a hand to keep himself from faceplanting. As fast as it had come, it disappeared and Kon was left gasping next to the fire, cold, clammy, and exhausted.
He looked up slowly to see Alice’s pale face, her eyes wide in shock as she stared down at him. Their eyes met for a moment and then Alice schooled herself so quickly that Kon thought he had imagined it. That her look of surprise and horror had been fake.
“What?” he whispered at her. Too tired and hurt to care to play along with the eccentric Knight.
“You used all twenty-two cores for a single node?” She whispered at him. Then she threw her head back and roared with laughter, even if there was an edge of manic energy to it.
“You told me to,” Kon defended himself as he tried to get to his feet. The passage of time was apparent to him, the deepening of the gloom, the evisceration and consumption of most of a D-Grade monster, how cramped his legs were. He nearly folded back toward the ground, catching himself at the last moment with a titanic effort of will.
“No I didn’t. Did I? At most you needed maybe ten of them? The rest could have been used for your second node that we could have done in a day or two. Or slowly teach you how to use the damn thing. Guess we’ll need to go and find more of them.”
“Wait. Are you saying I almost blew up?”Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“I didn’t say that. I said you used to many of them.”
“But, did I almost blow up?”
“I mean…kinda? Closer than anyone I’ve ever seen anyways. That node is going to be a beast though. Which sucks because you’ll need an even bigger beast of a core to power it.”
“I’m too tired for this. Can I please eat, I’m starving.” Kon flopped down, making sure to keep his legs straight, and watched as Alice began to carve apart some of the F-Grade monsters he had killed with her axe. The smell of sizzling meat tempted his stomach and he lay there as he waited for his meal.
“Kon, you did good. Nobody becomes important without taking risks. I wish my first level was as big as yours is going to be. The core will probably need a D-Grade monster to fuel it the way you’re going. Don’t worry, we’ll get you there. Couple of nodes in you and you’ll be fighting like a Knight in no time.”
Alice chattered away next to him, but Kon ignored it. He wasn’t mad at the Knight. He wasn’t happy with her either. He was just tired. Tired to the bone and just wanted to eat and sleep. And a shower. He was a mess of gore and dried sweat and was starting to itch and smell bad enough his nose wrinkled if he caught a whiff of himself.
Then she shoved a spit of fire roasted meat into his hands and hunger became the only thing he thought of. He was starved. The first bite was nirvana. Blood exploded across his tongue and energy raced through him as he fought back a moan of pleasure. It wasn’t soft meat, tough, stringy, and gamey with a hint of metal in every bite. He ate the entire thing without taking a break for air, chewing in a berserk fury as the bottomless pit that was his stomach craved more.
From the moment he swallowed the first bite of partially masticated meat, he felt the node activate. A humm in his gut that was neither pleasant, nor unpleasant, and then energy was coursing through his body. Slowly at first, but then with greater and greater speed, until he felt nearly normal by the time he finished off that spear of meat.
He tossed aside the stick and flopped back down on the ground, sated and awake. Alice watched him for a moment before snorting softly and shaking her head. Then she reached down and picked up another spear off the fire.
“Hey, Kon?”
“Yeah?”
“That meat you just ate was a D-Grade monster.”
Kon froze and turned to look at the Knight. Her face wasn’t mischievous but there was a calculated look to it that sent a shiver of fear down his spine. It was the way one appraised the goods at a merchant’s stall and had found something you wanted. On discount.
“You told me if I did that, I’d die.”
“Oh you should be dead. Energy poisoning is a bitch. That node you made is gnarly though. Ate it all up and filtered it out without a problem. I want you to close your eyes and focus on it and tell me what you’re feeling when you visualize the node.”
Kon glared at her. She was using him as some sort of cultivation experiment to see how far she could push someone. And he was starting to get pissed at her. She saw it all, her eyes roved over his face and she just smiled wider. It didn’t matter if he was mad at her, or hated her. She was so far above him in strength that it didn’t matter and she was the only one who could teach him.
He closed his eyes and focused inward like she had told him to do. It only took a few breaths before he felt the flare of energy in his stomach and the rune fragment appeared. It was red-gold as before, but now there was a crimson aura around the floating fragment that was slowly being released.
“Is that the beastly taint?”
Kon reported what he found and Alice’s smile widened even further.
“Tell me the exact wording of your intent. Please?” She added the last part as he glared harder at her. He told her and her smile froze on her face as an eyebrow rose up.
“That’s probably why you needed so many cores. You got dangerously close to trying to use a fragment as a full concept.”
“I simplified it. Shouldn’t that make it easier?”
“No. This isn’t math. You made your concept broader so it requires more energy to work. You no longer filter out monstrous rift tainted energy from regular rift energy, now you filter out all energy. Which is why you can eat the D-Grade meat. You're filtering out all the extra energy, bleeding it away slowly. You look like a small reactor right now the amount of energy pouring out of you.”
“And you can’t do that without a powerful rune. Why can’t I normally just vent the energy?”
“Cause your body is a greedy whore and will try to take all the power it can get, even if it causes you to blow up. That’s why we need the nodes and cores. They’re a way of safely and repeatedly using power far beyond what mortal bodies can take. It’s why the early Knights died so often. They used the cores directly through their body, only some of the energy left them. The rest burrowed itself inside of them and killed them slowly. Nodes are a way of filtering that energy out and channeling it. Cores are ways of constantly containing excess energy or powering nodes without a monster core.”
“This explanation would have been nice like, five hours ago. Before I tried to make the node.”
“I did explain it!”
“Not very well!” Kon shot back, irritated at his supposed mentor. She was a terrible instructor.
“Leo would be better at this. I just get it. It makes sense to me without explanation. Just like fighting. It just clicks. I’m not used to explaining stuff to people.” Alice got quiet for a minute and then reached over and started to eat another thing of spitted meat.
“So, what happens now with this node? I can eat any type of monster meat and be fine?” Alice barked a laugh.
“These are weak D-Grade beasts and your venting energy is like a reactor in a meltdown right now. A peak D-Grade would overwhelm your node and you’d die. What it does mean though, is that you’ll recover faster. Instead of having to kill a bunch of F-Grades, we can just hunt weak D-Grades. Next node we will do will be a healing node. Filter to keep you topped up and a healing node to repair the damage. Then the real training can start.”
If Alice had both of her hands, Kon was sure she’d be rubbing them gleefully right now. The woman looked positively ecstatic about the possibility of increasing the training regimen she was thinking up on the spot.
“More F-Grades for now then? Is there another rift close by?”
“What you mean? You’ve only barely cleared the spill over from that little F-Grade rift. We’re going in and taking that Rift anchor out and shutting the damn thing down.”
Kon looked at her as she smiled broadly at him. The two of them were going to close a rift? By themselves? Even just a small F-Grade rift would require a full team. He wanted to run over to the closest tree and bash his skull in on the metallic surface. His only weapon was a rock! Instead he squared his shoulders and looked over at the battle crazed lunatic and asked the only acceptable question.
“When?”