The Rune Formation (Part I)

Reya knelt down and touched the golems. She ran a small electric current through.

"These things are highly conductive. Interesting."

Eo, realizing this, quickly started scrapping the golems. He'd want to use it in the future.

"What are you going to use all that for?"

"Uhh… research… conducting?"

Reya shot him a skeptical glance.

She started to move towards them mounds when Eo distracted her.

"Hey, these rune formations… could these be deciphered?"

Runecasting was an ancient technique developed to channel essence into specialized "gates" to create an even more advanced technique. They were analogous, but not related to the tattoos formed on people. It required the creator's essence to function, so other people couldn't control the rune without removing the essence. Removing the essence from the rune, however, was virtually impossible to do without damaging it. This was because the rune would "remember" its creator, and even after using up all the essence in its reservoirs, it would outright reject other people's essences.

Eo had the basic gist of this already taught to him when he approached the formation. Of course, this hadn't registered in his head during the heat of battle before. Now however, he was thinking about how odd it was to still be activated.

(The rune still being active… wouldn't that mean there has been a person sitting underground for weeks? Or, more realistically, there was an essence-storing device powering it all...)

Eo tried searching around for the source of the energy. The most common rune formations were radially arranged around the center, so Eo tried to find a pattern in the purple lines visible to him.

"No apparent pattern…"

Eo stood up. The irregular geography of the sand coupled with the fact that parts of the rune were clipping into the dunes made it nearly impossible to make out anything.

"We need to get higher."

Reya watched Eo jump from golem to golem until he was as high as he could. Apparently the highest vantage point was the 20 ton block of iron Eo had synthesized way back then, which Reya was staring at incredulously.

"So," Reya said, turning back to the rune formation, "when are we going to turn this into a trap?"

"Uh, hold on. We need to first figure out how these work."

Reya stared intently at the battle scene instead of the formation.

"I'll try to figure out how the battle played out. We could probably find out stuff such as the trigger, the weak points, and so on."

Eo momentarily panicked. "N-no, it's fine. We can get all that if we knew how the formation itself worked."

Reya shrugged. "Fine then. Tell me when you find something interesting."

Eo started placing scrap below him. He continued pillaring up like a certain popular block game he once played. It was sort of terrifying, actually, because the whole thing was so unstable.

After a respectable height Eo looked back down. Because of the distance the faint light was even harder to see, and Eo could barely make out the glowing lines.

But he saw the pattern nevertheless.

"Reya!" He shouted. "It's a ray formation!"

"Which is..?"

Eo forgot Reya didn't enlist in the Academy.

"I'll explain when I get down."

Eo climbed down, carefully disassembling the tower of golem bits. By the time he reached the hunk of metal Eo had mentally figured out where the origin of the source was. Also, he had found out while looking from above that about 50% of the formation was hidden in the sand. Eo was lucky he and Reya didn't step in any of the active regions of the rune.

He climbed down the 20-ton hunk.

"Eo, found out anything else yet?"

"Well, yeah. There's good news and bad news."

"Just say both."

"The good news is, I now know where the power source should be located, based off of the geometry of the pattern."

"Can you rephrase that in Standard, please?"

Ignoring Reya, Eo continued. "The bad news is, the source is located all the way over…" Eo raised a finger and slowly turned around until it pointed at the metal hunk he was standing on earlier. "...There."

Reya raised an eyebrow.

"I don't believe you. Shouldn't the essence-source be destroyed then? You know, from being squished by a giant block of metal and all."

Eo scratched his head.

"Maybe it's just a really, really unsquishable power source. Actually, that sounds pretty cool. Which is all the more reason why we should remove the giant block!"

Reya narrowed her eyes. "We can't just move this giant hunk of metal. And if I remember, it takes a great deal of essence to decompose elements of their affinity that they haven't created themselves."

Eo laughed. "And this is where you're wrong!"

"Huh? Don't tell me you actually synthesized this all by your-"

Eo dragged a golem carcass into a specific spot in the rune formation. He then put his right hand on the block, and pointed his left hand downwards.

Reya watched in awe as the enormous 20-ton block of iron started decomposing, grey wisps shedding off and flying into Eo's hand. Out his other hand, brilliant white wisps of essence flew down and off to the side, directly into what Eo called the "essence-sucking sector".

But most shocking of all was when all that essence rippled along the rune lines and into the scrap metal, where it circulated wildly and uncontrollably.

"So this 'essence-sucking' formation really did exist!"

"See? I told you!"