In a League of His Own
Loty carefully unfurled the scroll.
Etched across the pristine white vellum was a rune radiating concentrated power. To Reed, the archaic character almost felt alive, pulsing with its own quiet breath.
"Aren't ancient relics usually terrifyingly destructive?" Loty asked. "Maybe whatever's inside this thing can kill that monster."
"It's certainly not out of the question," Reed replied.
Loty's suggestion was, in truth, their sole remaining hope of breaking through the deadlock. Beyond that, Reed couldn't think of a single viable way to overcome the demon worshippers and their abomination.
Yet a glaring problem remained.
"The real issue," Iseline said, her brow furrowed with worry, "is that we don't know what kind of rune this actually is. More to the point, we have no idea how it triggers."
If unsealing the scroll initiated a self-destruct mechanism, they would all be sent off to the afterlife together without so much as corpses left behind. Wasn't this exact uncertainty the reason they had intended to have an expert appraise it in the first place?
"Ugh..." Loty groaned, unable to counter her logic.
Reed shook his head and closed his eyes. Overcoming dire straits inevitably required taking risks, but this was a gamble with miserable odds. It was the equivalent of spending one's life savings on lottery tickets just because life had hit a dead end.
As Reed racked his brain, he caught a subtle presence stirring behind him. He turned, only to find himself staring straight into the brightly glowing eye sockets of a skeleton.
"Whoa!"
Clack, clack.
As Reed flinched, Iseline leaned toward the undead laborer. "Oh, my. Member Montly, do you have something to share?"
Clack, clack!
"Pardon?"
Clack, clack.
"Oh, of course! How could I have forgotten?!"
As the skeleton clicked his teeth rhythmically, Iseline nodded along before clapping her hands in delight.
"Our dear Member Montly here was an antique and relic broker during his lifetime! How could that slip my mind?"
Clack.
"Member Montly says he can appraise the scroll to a reasonable degree! Truly an indispensable member of our cooperative!"
At Iseline's effusive praise, Skeleton Montly scratched his smooth skull with bashful modesty. Reed and Loty exchanged dazed glances before hurriedly presenting the scroll to him.
Skeleton Montly turned the parchment this way and that, examining the strokes before rattling his teeth once more.
Clack, clack. Clack-clack-clack.
"What is he saying?" Reed asked.
"Collapse... no, it appears to be a rune related to explosion. What's more, this scroll seems intended for an enchant!"
Unfamiliar with the term, Reed asked, "An enchant?"
"It means engraving a rune into an object so you can channel its power at will," Iseline explained brightly. "Like onto a knight's armor, or a mage's staff. After all, mages can't master every single branch of magic, right? So they enchant their staves with various runes to supplement their repertoire. In fact, a mage's caliber is often judged by the strength of the staff they carry."
In this era, it was common knowledge that a proper mage ought to wield a staff. Even impoverished hedge-mages carried around well-shaped tree branches just to keep up appearances.
Reed nodded along to Iseline's thorough explanation. He had thought he was doing a passable job mimicking a regular mage by now, but it seemed he still had a long way to go.
"A rune containing an explosion... It really is exactly what we need right now," Iseline said, her tone calm and admiring. "So... I would like you to be the one to use it, Lord Reed. At least in terms of raw capability as a spellcaster, you far surpass me."
Having witnessed Reed's combat performance with her own eyes, Iseline conceded the point without hesitation. Loty nodded in swift agreement; he possessed virtually no mana to begin with.
"Looks like you're finally getting yourself a proper staff," Loty remarked. "So, do you have something to engrave it onto?"
"I do."
Reed reached behind his back and unslung his ash-handled iron shovel. It was his steadfast companion, the trusty tool that had seen him through thick and thin to secure his daily bread.
If I'm going to turn anything into a staff, it has to be this fellow.
Loty stared at him, dumbfounded. "Uh... look, I know this isn't the time to be picky, but shouldn't you pick something a bit more dignified? A shovel is a little..."
"What do other mages usually use for their staves?" Reed asked.
"Well, usually long wooden shafts, don't they?"
Reed raised the shovel vertically. "First of all, is it long?"
It was indeed long.
"Is it made of wood?"
It was. What was more, it was crafted from durable ash wood—the very material many high-ranking mages favored for their staves.
"Then doesn't it satisfy all the requirements?"
"Uh... does it?"
Confronted by Reed's flawless reasoning, Loty felt that something was distinctly off, yet found himself unable to mount a counterargument. Besides, as Reed had noted, they didn't have the luxury of fretting over trivial aesthetics.
Reed wrapped the parchment tightly around the shovel's ash handle. He cast a questioning glance at Skeleton Montly to ensure he was doing it correctly.
Clack.
Montly gave him a clean thumbs-up. Relieved, Reed drew a dagger from his belt and sliced down the length of the parchment.
Rrrriiiip!
As the scroll parted, a soft luminescence blossomed into the air. The rune detached from the paper, hovering in midair before tracing an elegant arc and sinking into the wood. Seconds later, the ancient character branded itself indelibly onto the shovel's forged iron blade.
Feels like an upgrade effect straight out of a video game. Should I call it 'Mysterious Runic Shovel (+1)'?
Reed gripped the shaft. Or perhaps it was proper to call it a magic staff now. The moment he channeled mana into the handle, the rune flared to life, twisting the incoming flow of energy into an entirely different configuration.
He didn't understand the underlying principles. Just as people used complex tools in modern times without comprehending every engineering nuance behind them, he didn't need academic theory to grasp its application. Instinct told him precisely how to trigger it.
Reed tapped the edge of the shovel blade against a nearby boulder.
BOOM!
With a concussive crack, the rock fractured and burst into shards. Under normal circumstances, shattering such stone would have required vigorous labor with a chisel and mallet.
Watching the demonstration, Loty murmured in awe, "...That's going to make demolition work insanely convenient."
In the deepest recesses of the subterranean sewer system, Nadja reclined languidly upon a throne woven from tangled human corpses.
She held absolute dominion over the underground waterways. Every conduit, ingress, and egress remained under her unyielding control. Yet she knew this leisurely dominance would not last forever. Having raised such a chaotic spectacle, discovery was only a matter of time.
The Governor will notice soon enough.
The Governor of Morasil had recently been hunting down demon worshippers with ruthless fervor; once he caught wind of this disturbance, retribution would be swift and merciless. Thus, she needed to salvage whatever spoils she could in the brief window remaining.
Thralls brought forward heaps of coin and valuables plundered from slain mercenaries, laying the tribute at her feet. But Nadja merely yawned, utterly disinterested in conventional wealth.
"Was there no clue regarding the King's Secret Treasure? Knowing the nature of the ancients, they must have secreted something in a place like this."
Unlike the mindless husks, a man who retained a shred of his former intellect bowed low before her. "Forgive me, Mistress. We searched the mercenaries thoroughly, but found no relics of that nature. However... we did secure forty-seven additional thralls."
"Hah! Forty-seven cattle, and not a single relic among them? Incompetent wretches."
Nadja's porcelain face twisted with disgust. If there was one thing in the world she loathed above all else, it was incompetence. Waving her hand dismissively to banish the useless rabble from her sight, she asked, "Come to think of it, where is my lovely Raphal? He proved quite useful, so I went through the trouble of bestowing our Lord's blessing upon him. Surely he has performed admirably?"
"About that..." The thrall swallowed hard, his voice trembling violently. "He... crossed paths with a mage."
"A mage?"
Dripping with cold sweat, the thrall stammered out the report: a necromancer and an earth mage had breached their perimeter, and the forces had failed to eliminate them.
Nadja instantly deduced the mage's identity.
"Ah. That brat?"
Her reaction was tepid. At one point, she had toyed with the whim of keeping Reed as a pet slave, but her fascinations cooled as rapidly as they flared. Put plainly, Reed simply wasn't worth sustained attention.
"He's nothing more than a fledgling. Puffed up with pride just because he can fling a few spells, but completely unremarkable. You can find a dozen like him on any street corner."
The thrall eagerly seized upon her disdain. "Y-yes, precisely, Mistress! His petty sorcery couldn't leave so much as a scratch on Lord Raphal!"
"Come to think of it, didn't he choose that dirty lizard over me back then? Now that I remember, it is rather irritating. How marvelous. They can both be swallowed into Raphal's belly together."
"The pack is in pursuit as we speak. No matter how labyrinthine these tunnels are, they are trapped rats. Capturing them is merely a matter of time."
"Splendid," Nadja murmured, her lips curling into an enchanting smile. "If you fail this time as well, I'll turn you into an empty husk like the rest of them. Understood?"
"...Yes, Mistress!"
The thrall scrambled backward and vanished into the dark. Watching his frantic departure, Nadja let out another long, languid yawn.
"Haaah... Every single one of them is dreadfully dull."
Was there truly no one capable of defying her expectations and offering a genuine shock? To her, the entire world had grown terribly tedious.
In a damp corridor nearby, Reed and his companions quickly finalized their strategy.
"The monster itself is formidable enough, but the swarms of cultists trailing behind it are just as troublesome," Iseline cautioned. "Even if we engage the beast, we must isolate it from its minions."
"Then we'll do this," Reed said, his gaze dropping to the murky wastewater sloshing through the central conduit.
Earlier, Iseline had remarked on the catastrophic danger posed by debris dams choking mountain streams. Her offhand comment had sparked an idea in Reed's mind.
We build a dam right here.
They would impound the wastewater, letting it build into a massive reservoir before detonating the barricade all at once. What tactic could possibly be more fitting for a stonemason?
The party moved into frantic motion. Loty chipped away at the masonry walls to supply stone and earthen rubble, while the others hauled the debris into the conduit to choke the channel. To anyone watching, it looked as though the crew sent to repair the sewers had turned around and begun sabotaging them instead. But survival took precedence over propriety.
Time was running out. Sweat poured down Loty's face as he hammered tirelessly at the masonry, muttering in frustration, "Hey, if you look around here, I'm sure you could dig up a corpse or two. Can't you raise them as undead? We're desperate for every spare pair of hands we can get!"
Reed silently agreed that it was a practical notion. The undead laborers under Iseline's command had proven exceptionally capable.
Iseline, however, remained unyielding.
"Out of the question. When the Governor granted our cooperative sanctuary, he strictly decreed that we may never raise any corpse without prior, voluntary consent. That is the law."
"Is this really the time to be quoting regulations?!" Loty snapped. "We're on the verge of being slaughtered!"
"If I violate that edict, I will be executed the moment I return to the surface anyway. Furthermore, if I break my sacred pledge, how could any of our members ever trust me with their remains?"
Wading waist-deep into the foul sludge to heave stones alongside her skeletal workers, Iseline offered a quiet, resolute truth: "No matter the circumstances, the law must be upheld. Because that very law is what protects us."
Her words struck Reed like a physical blow.
Throughout his past life and his present one, the law had never once offered him shelter. It had only ever been an instrument of oppression or a bureaucratic nuisance to tiptoe around. Yet to Iseline—a necromancer belonging to a caste hunted and persecuted across the entire continent—the Governor's edicts were the single lifeline keeping her and her kin alive.
So laws can actually protect people... That is why she clings to them so fiercely, even when facing death.
It was another profound lesson. Indeed, there was always something to learn from everyone. Reed now understood why Smith had vouched for the necromancer cooperative's integrity. His intellectual appetite sated, Reed felt an unexpected smirk tug at his lips.
"Hurry it up!"
"Member Montly! Place that boulder over here!"
With Loty's masonry expertise, Reed's earth magic, and the tireless labor of the undead, the makeshift dam rose with astonishing speed. Formed of piled trash, rubble, rotten timber, and packed mud, it was crude, yet more than sturdy enough to choke the flow. The filthy water pooled rapidly behind the barrier, rising from their calves to their thighs.
I'd love to stack it higher, but...
Their pursuers were not going to wait.
Figures emerged from the shadowy tunnel downstream. Stumbling cultists spotted the workers and let out guttural shrieks.
"Grrrk! Khhk!"
At the signal, thralls converged in droves, shuffling methodically toward the barricade. They showed none of their earlier reckless frenzy; instead, they moved with an eerie patience, as if ushering in something far worse.
None of them needed to guess what it was.
"Ooooorrrrgh!"
"It's here!"
With a low, vibrating roar that resonated through the stone floor, the mutated monstrosity appeared. Heedless of the makeshift dam ahead, it surged forward on a tangle of chitinous limbs, churning through the wastewater. It appeared thoroughly enraged—perhaps having lost Reed earlier had wounded its beastly pride.
Splash. Splash. Splash.
Watching the multi-legged abomination scuttle across the fouled floor, Reed tightened his grip on the ash handle of his shovel. Loty had already retreated to a secure firing position behind him, while Shaka, Iseline, and the two skeletal warriors held their assigned flanks.
Reed watched the approaching horror and counted down under his breath.
Three.
The grotesque demonic entity unhinged its maw, revealing concentric rings of fangs as the pack of thralls surged behind it.
Two.
Reflected in the creature's weeping, pus-dripping compound eyes, Reed's silhouette grew clear. He drew his internal mana taut, pooling it into a singular focus.
One.
The beast was practically on top of them. Reed poured his mana into the shovel, causing the carved rune on the blade to burn with blinding brilliance.
Now!
KABOOM!
The Explosion Rune detonated. The center of the earthen dam gave way in an instant, unleashing the pent-up reservoir in a violent, roiling tidal wave.
ROAAAR!
The monstrous vanguard was driven back a few paces, its sheer mass allowing it to dig its claws into the stone bed and weather the surge. But the swarming cultists behind it stood no chance; the churning torrent swept their legs out from under them, tumbling bodies head over heels into the subterranean dark.
In a single stroke, the beast was left completely isolated.
"OOOOOOORRRGH!"
Yet the creature cared nothing for its lost retinue. Blinded by fury, it fixated solely on Reed and charged with ravenous speed.
Reed took a slow, measured breath, allowing absolute calm to settle over his nerves.
I have to kill it with an explosion.
What was an explosion? It was the violent release of force—the sudden, outward expansion of energy that had been tightly compressed. To generate a truly devastating blast, one had to pack an immense amount of mana into a dense space. And to compress mana efficiently, one required a vessel.
A vessel that was sufficiently vast, yet unbreakable.
Reed thrust both hands forward. The earth beneath the water stirred, rising into a dense sphere of packed soil before him.
Shhhk!
Under his command, the sphere warped, compacted, and transmuted into a flawless orb of translucent, hardened quartz. A vessel of immense volume and diamond-like rigidity was complete.
Without hesitation, Reed channeled a torrential flood of mana into the crystal sphere. Running out of magical reserves was never a concern for him; if there was one thing he possessed in boundless abundance, it was mana.
"GROOOOOH!"
As the beast closed the distance, Reed hurled the crystal orb straight into its path and raised the runic shovel high above his head.
In this singular convergence, Earth Control, Property Change ― Crystallization, and the ancient Explosion Rune intertwined as one.
⟨ Crystal Bomb ⟩
CRRRRAAAAASH!
A thunderous detonation rocked the entire sewer network as the pressurized crystal sphere shattered.
Razor-sharp quartz shrapnel sprayed outward in every direction. Shards collided, fragmented into micro-crystals, refracted the ambient light, and scattered like a storm of luminescent diamond dust—a display of terrifying, sublime beauty.
It was a spectacle grand enough to serve as a fitting monument for someone's final moments.
Yet that ethereal beauty concealed lethal violence. The concentrated shrapnel hammered directly into the charging beast at point-blank range.
Th-th-th-thud!
"SKREEEE-OOOORRRGH!"
Peppered by hundreds of high-velocity crystalline fragments, the monster shrieked in agony. Torrents of steaming black blood burst from its ruptured hide, dying the filthy wastewater crimson. Yet even under such catastrophic trauma, the fiend refused to die. Despite taking the brunt of an explosive blast directly to its chest, its lungs continued to heave, its flesh knitting together with unnatural haste as its twisted limbs dug into the muck.
Its resilience and regenerative vitality were staggering. Snarling through blood-frothed jaws, it prepared to lunge at Reed once more.
However, another crystal sphere was already resting lightly in Reed's hand.
With an effortless flick of his wrist, Reed lobbed the second orb straight into the monster's wide-open maw.
"......"
In that fleeting fraction of a second, Reed's eyes met the monster's. Did the beast finally comprehend its impending demise? Reed studied those glassy, weeping orbs with intense scrutiny.
A strange thought crossed his mind.
Why do those eyes look so familiar?
BOOM!
The second sphere detonated from within.
The monster's torso bucked violently as countless crystalline spikes ruptured outward through its hide, shredding its flesh into ribbons from the inside out. No matter how monstrous its constitution, surviving internal demolition was impossible. Its legs convulsed as it tried to rise, but with its organs and brain reduced to liquefied pulp, it collapsed helplessly into the mire.
"Urr... gh..."
Splash.
With one final, pathetic rasp, the abomination plunged face-first into the murky water and moved no more.
Only then did Reed release a long, shuddering breath and lower his shovel.
Whew. Somehow, we survived again.
To think he had crossed paths with yet another mutated monstrosity so soon after defeating the Crystal Kobold. Still, it was the crystallization magic he had unlocked from that very encounter that had saved his life today, so he had no right to complain. Besides, a beast of this magnitude would serve as a magnificent offering to appease Ur!
At the thought of the divine bounty awaiting him, a satisfied grin spread across Reed's face.
Meanwhile, Iseline and Loty, who had watched the entire confrontation unfold from behind, stood frozen in sheer shock.
"He... he actually killed it. We barely lifted a finger..."
"What in the gods' names was the power behind that explosion...?"
The devastating might of that crystal bomb defied belief. A creature that had seemed utterly unkillable lay dead in the mud. And the one who had orchestrated its annihilation was a mere fifteen-year-old boy!
Good grief...
Loty was well aware that Guildmaster Darahalt held Reed in extraordinarily high regard. Some of the older journeymen had grumbled behind closed doors, whispering that the guildmaster was playing favorites and lavishing an apprentice with unfair privileges. But seeing this with his own eyes, Loty could only let out a hollow laugh at how foolish those complaints were.
Unfair, my ass.
Guildmaster Darahalt had been entirely justified. Reed deserved every ounce of special treatment he received, and more.
Loty accepted the reality with quiet deference, but Iseline's shock ran far deeper. As an ordained practitioner of magic herself, she understood the technical genius and terrifying control required for what Reed had just demonstrated on a much more profound level.
She recalled the modest words she had spoken only moments ago:
'At least in terms of raw capability as a spellcaster, you far surpass me.'
Iseline let out a dazed, self-mocking chuckle.
"He doesn't just surpass me... That boy is a monster. He's..."
The words caught in her throat, choked off by what little pride she maintained as a spellcaster. But in her heart, she knew the truth.
He was in a completely different league.