Bang!

 Runes, the earliest form of magic discovered by humans, no one knows how or where exactly it was discovered but it quickly became a norm for those talented enough to wield its power. Runes allowed humans to wield magic beyond comprehension putting the human race on par with races like elves, dragons and the like, but even considering the great power runes granted it had downsides, first, you could only activate runes if you had an extraordinarily large amount of mana, which humanity couldn't afford in large numbers and two, runes need a medium to be drawn on before being activated. In a battlefield you wouldn't expect the enemy to wait until you were done drawing, which would be ridiculous.

Considering all these downsides, humans abandoned runes as soon as they found a better alternative and for the past 2000 years no rune user has been heard of, that was until today, today Ethan will start his journey on the path of becoming the rune king, one of the strongest king history will ever know, but let's leave that for the future and focus on his first rune achievement.

 Ethan entered his lab barely containing his excitement, everyone may think he became determined after he found out he couldn't bond with magic 7 years ago but no, he didn't become determined, he became desperate, all his life he hadn't known what the word failure meant until he turned 10. Although they didn't show it, he knew his parents wished he could use magic, but today marks the day everything changes for Ethan thanks to the power of runes.

For any other human, runes provide a lot of disadvantages but not for Ethan. Ethan had already thought of solutions to the limitations runes came with, for one, the mana limitation does not apply to him since he has almost infinite mana and two, he found a work around for the medium part but first let's summaries how runes work according to Ethan's research.

Let's take the fire rune as an example, after drawing the rune you'll need to input your mana, this is the stage where you define the 'traits' of the fire you want to create for example you could make it hot or even cold, red or blue, it all depends on the users input while supplying the mana.

Now humans understood the word 'medium' as something like paper, gloves or even the ground but Ethan thought, what if you could apply runes to intangible mediums like air or mana for example. That's what Ethan has been researching for the past two years, the problem he faced while researching this was that although he could create magic from his hands or any body part actually, let's say he fought an earth mage, he would be in a disadvantageous spot since most elemental mages could affect or change the terrain to some extent. So how did he solve that? He actually took inspiration from magical beasts, he bat beasts to be more specific, since they were basically blind, they release sound based mana which reports back to the beast the types of mana signatures in the environment which allows them to find or avoid enemies and also to navigate.

Ethan plans to use the same method but in a different way, he will release mana in the environment which leaves rune prints on either the environment or the enemy or both, which makes it impossible to see his attack coming since he could just trigger the imprinted rune.

The second problem he faced was his rune repertoire, since runes has basically been forgotten by humans, he was actually very lucky to find a book on runes in his dad's library. This means he had to create every rune spell he uses, but lucky for Ethan, runes were not elemental oriented but encoding oriented, meaning he just has to input different attributes in a single rune circle to create new variations.

The way Ethan did this was by creating a rune in which he could define what new rune he wanted to create and voila! He had a new rune spell and best of all, he made a screen which only he could see for easy creation of his spells.

"Okay, let's see if his works" he said, preparing to create his first spell.

"Let's start with something simple, maybe a wind bullet" Ethan said and called up the screen and started defining the attributes for a wind bullet.

[Rune created!

Rune name: Wind bullet

Description: releases pressurized air from the user's finger

Conditions: can only be activated when the word "bang!" is said.

]

Ethan was grinning from ear to ear seeing the screen working as expected, now for the moment of truth.

"Let's see if I can finally use magic" he said, moving away from his lab desk to a relatively safe section of the lab.

Ethan pointed his finger towards his experimental dummy which was by a wall in his lab and said the words.

"Bang!".