(Second Book Complete!) Runeblade: A Delving & Skill Merging LitRPG

Kaius needed a gods’ damned break.

Grinding his teeth, he pushed himself up and lumbered over to the small kitchen in the entrance room. Turning on a faucet powered by unintelligible system inscriptions, he shoved his head under the cold stream.

It was clarifying, a sharp slap that fought off the fugue that came with yet another death. How many was that now? He didn’t know — sure, his mind was sharp enough that he could trawl through his memories and find out.

The very thought of it made him sick. Better they all blend into a meaningless mash of sudden pain and rushing black.

He could feel the weight now. The creeping tendrils of Mentis; the Authority of The Veteran’s Edge. They wormed their way through him; perfused his very being to send out feelers into the world around him. Tasting. Reacting. Contemplating.

His insight and ego. Him.

It was progress. Progress that made him overjoyed — a change of substance that felt more real than any of the dreamlike sprints where he clawed yet another stride closer to the finish. It helped that it was constant — with him, instead of a moment of repetition consigned to memory when yet another bullshit trap cut his feet out from under him.

All the progress in the world would have made him no less weary. Whether it had been thirty deaths or a hundred, time slipped through his fingers. How long had it been? At least a month, he was sure. He could feel that with certainty, a growing ball of discomfort that curdled behind his ribs.

Oh, his progress had sped up. Every run he learnt something new, and further mastered something old. He barely needed to use his spells for the first dozen or so obstacles now.

Still, it felt like he’d made a dent. This trial might as well have been endless — leagues of death and dismemberment separating him from the finish line.

All that death had hardened him — to the disorientation of pain, but also in the form of the growth of his abilities. It was slow — slower than he would have liked. Without enemies to fight, most of his skills stagnated. Even those he used in their element grew slower than they should — yet another limitation of the trial, no doubt.

Even if it had been limited, so many deaths had left their mark.

Kaius sighed, staying where he was as water ran in rivulets down his face. Looking through his notifications, he peered at the changes.

**Ding! Class Skill Notifications Consolidated!**

**Latent Glyph of Vyrthane has reached level 101 > 109!**

…

**Latent Glyph of Eirnith has reached level 101 > 103!**

…

**Latent Glyph of Muthryn; Throat of VOS has reached level 7 > 23!**

**General Skill Notifications Consolidated!**

**Truesight has reached level 180 > 181!**

…

**Tonal Weaving has reached level 179 > 192!**

…

**Resonance Amplification has reached level 183 > 191!**

Kaius nodded in satisfaction. There were, he supposed, some benefits to being trapped in an endless loop — even with the artificial slow down.

It didn’t change the fact that he needed a gods’ damned break. All these runs were wearing away at him like a grindstone — blunting his mind and burgeoning connection to Mentis.

Maybe he could do some resistance training?

He perked up at the thought, remembering the wealth of toxins in one of his storage rings. Looted from Old Yon’s vault, they were as varied as they were noxious. Even if most of them kept to the more commonly seen affinities, surely with so many there would have to be some that he could adapt to?

Even if his skill was capped in levels, it would still be a good use. The stronger he got, the more chance his innate Constitution and Vitality would be able to shrug off lesser afflictions: robbing Rapid Adaptation of the chance to adjust to the novel energies.

Besides, poisoning himself would be light work compared to some of the traps he suffered.

That, and his Skill wasn’t seeing all that many gains in the runs themselves. Sure, the traps were plentiful and used a full gamut of affinities — but they killed him too bloody fast. Whatever strange magic reset the loop also seemed to reset any adaption that his skill had built up; even if it was quick naturally, it still normally took some time. Anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on just how close he had gotten.

A problem — and one that emphasised the weakness of the skill. It was phenomenal against afflictions, but like all first tier, and most second tier, resistance skills it did far less to blunt the impact of direct attacks. Even less if there was persistent summoned material — it was hard to resist a rock when it caved through your skull.

Even with his limitations, he’d tried to spend some time innoculating himself, but there were few traps that would do anything less than utterly slaughter him, and the ones that didn’t tended to be in the middle of high difficulty obstacles. The ones where even the slightest wound would get him killed anyway.

Kaius sighed. Drinking poisons was a poor excuse for a break, but it was something. He didn’t want to relax, not really. Just do something that had a definable and reachable goal.

Turning off the faucet, he shook the water from his hair and made his way to the bed. One by one, he lay dozens of noxious toxin bottles on the ground, sorting them by affinity. Thankfully, there were plenty of duplicates — so any he found would likely be enough for him to adapt to.

On the other hand, he’d been right: most of the toxins were of common affinities he could already resist. Most were poison affinity, while the rest were from the basic elements, disease, and — disturbingly — there were more than a few fear affinity toxins.

This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.

In comparisons, there were only a paltry few with new affinities. Though, luckily they all had at least six individual draughts. It was still five new resistances he could accrue.

Storm, with a liquid that swirled like waves and sparked like thunder; Ocean, an inky black so deep that it looked crushing. Blood, staining the sides of its square glass bottles; Flesh, a deep pink, visible teeth and eyes growing and liquifying endlessly; Ooze, a brown that pulsed like a living thing, tendrils stretching up the glass like it wanted to escape. Each and every toxin looked nasty — exactly the kind of filth he would expect from a man like Old Yon, a criminal who kept a hidden trafficking compound.

Tapping on his knee, Kaius pondered each bottle. So many delightfully disgusting options, but where to start?

The worst made the most sense to him — he might as well get it out of the way. The flesh toxin looked…mutagenic. Having his body torn from him to be moulded into jibbering meat sounded up there with getting slowly pasted to death from the legs up, or clawing at his eyes as disease made his flesh slough and rot.

Conveniently, he’d died through both of those. He could take it.

Far more nonchalant than he knew he should be, Kaius downed his chosen toxin, chasing it with a second after he felt its potency.

It tasted of meat; life gone wrong, twisted from its purpose to suit a foul malevolence from beyond the pale. It reeked of broken promises: fealty, friendship, and the basic truth that the body would obey. Forgotten ice and paranoid fear crystalised on the back of his tongue, and his flesh rebelled.

**Ding! You have been afflicted by Thing of Meat - Flesh,Tier I**

His throat boiled, dripping into his stomach. Tendrils connected the drippings, letting him feel as he digested his own flesh — taste it as his stomach grew tongues.

Wheezing through his even breaths, Kaius raised his hand and watched his skin bubble — bulging growths swallowing his digits until they were constricted utterly. He tilted his head — only for every muscle in his body to seized at once.

His head slammed back, cracking against stone. Dissolving flesh released him; he slumped.

Rapid Adaptation swirled into being — tasting the new source of contagion as it roared through his veins. His eyes bubbled, replaced by fat, but he could still see — watch the energy in his mind.

He needed more. His vitality was surging — fighting off the infection as his health burned to shift his body back to normalcy, and stop his organs from failing. It was moving faster than his Skill, would purge the affliction before he could get the resistance.

Shuddering from the changes wrought on his flesh, Kaius reached for two more bottles of toxin.

They went down just as easy as the first.

….

Blood boiled, swelling in volume to tear its way free of his veins. Coagulated scalpels cut through muscles and organs, scouring his bones as they wormed ever deeper into his flesh.

Three bottles. Kaius thought he might need a fourth.

Vital fluid beaded on his skin, painting him red as he choked and drowned. His heart fluttered as clots piled higher at every junction; filled his stomach to bursting with the taste of iron.

All the while his health raised on, stitching him back together — forced him to persist in an undying half life.

Retching to clear his throat, Kaius spat a wad against the ground; he reached for the last bottle.

….

His gut feeling was right — ooze was nice and clean.

His skin melted, and his bones jellied as he dissolved from the inside out; his voice was quelled by a dozen lesions that filled his lungs with weepings — but it was clean.

Little more than a fleshy sack of soup, held together by grit, Skill, and copious healing — but his body didn’t rebel.

Kaius leaked onto the mattress beneath him and idly wondered how long it would take to die.

…

The storm raged within — racking ruin that scorched and cut his flesh. It was an internal wind that broke bone, and lightning-born fury that wracked him with seizures.

Every few moments, hateful energy would burst free of the maelstrom within him, tearing its way free of the cage that was his body. A gust of elemental fury that was joined by spraying blood.

He writhed, nerves overrun until there was no thought but animal sensation.

….

Ocean was more than he’d expected — more than just water. Kaius doubled over as he clutched his chest. His eyes were hard — focused. Pain was nothing.

The toxin filled his lungs, choking him from the inside — alighting a burning need to breathe. If that was it, it would have been almost peaceful.

He hadn’t accounted for the pressure. A crushing weight that surrounded him on all sides, compressing everything he was into a single point of pain.

Still, as horrific as it was, he’d long since been inured to pain — and there was only so much violation of his flesh he could suffer before it just became…pedestrian.

He gurgled, feeling Rapid Adaptation swell higher and higher with every heartbeat. It was looking likely he wouldn’t even die this time. At least he was almost done — his break had stretched on too long.

It was time for him to get back to pushing towards the end.

….

Kaius sighed, sitting up from the spot where he always restarted the loop.

He’d survived the ocean affinity toxin, but his lingering injuries had still been horendous when his health had finally bottomed out. Thankfully, a short and rather poor attempt at a run of the course had fixed him up right and good.

Snorting at the simple insanity that death had become mundane, Kaius wondered how healthy it really was to treat hours of extreme poisoning as a break.

It wasn’t his fault — his pain resistance made the actual discomfort almost easy to ignore, and it was hard to maintain a fear of death after experiencing so much of it. Besides — the agony hadn’t been the point. He’d needed something measurable. Something he could look at and go ‘See! There is a goal and an end!’.

The unending grind of the obstacle course was the true threat to his mind — not a little death and pain.

Pulling up his description of Rapid Adaptation, he stared at the recent additions in satisfaction.

Rapid Adaptation:

Level 200

Heroic

Resistances: Pain; Fear; Poison; Disease; Fire; Water; Earth; Air; Void; Aether; Venom; Corruption; Bone; Paralysis; Ice; Magma; Light; Wood; Crystal; Electric; Smog; Iron; Flesh; Blood; Ooze; Storm; Ocean

With his little diversion over, it was time to return to his attempts at the trial’s obstacles, but he did have a few ideas of other things he could work on when he needed more of a break.

He doubted it would be enough to cap everything. Beyond a lack of fights, there was something slowing his leveling down — he was sure of it. Even Truesight. By now, he was certain the skill had been limited in some way — left it unable to pierce illusions and other tricks that must hide the course’s traps from his sight. It wouldn’t level very quickly if the only thing he could do to train it was look further down the course.

That said, even with those limitations there were things to do. Mercurial Reversal had proven useful in helping him parry projectile based traps and obstacles — the ones slow enough he could react to them, at least. His glyphs could also use some work — Muthryn and VOS especially. The few times he’d resorted to relying on that conceptual insight, he’d noticed that the instability that it left on his body, mind, and soul vanished with a reset. It was an opportunity he’d been foolish to leave until this point — especially because he had a few ideas to explore that might help him with the true purpose of the trial.

Shaking himself off, Kaius jogged towards the start of the course. The spells he already had were enough for the first league, maybe more.

Breaking into a sprint, he kept his eyes locked on the finish line that waited in the distance.