Even the significantly reduced experience from Firehand’s holding back was well more than enough to get her ten levels all at once, throwing her past another stat boost. Helpfully, the heavy use of the teleportation had also cleared the most recent level of the rune quest.

Rune Quest |Merge|

Phase 5/20: Further Testing

Complete!

Phase 6/20: Refinement

Upgrade or recreate with increased effectiveness a prior item created using |Merge|.

“That explanation would be appreciated now.”

Deyana and Geria were running away from the landsharks’ area, going to get back into town before The Alliance would be able to mobilize its more powerful guildmembers over to the location. With Geria being there, they wouldn’t throw newbies in the way to slow them down, at least.

Guilds sending new members to be wiped out in less than a second tended to be bad for recruitment.

“Someone I know in reality. Offered to help, I gave them just enough info to be believable but not enough to find me. My best guess at least. I was expecting they’d take longer to get the core out of the city.” Deyana explained, throwing the stat boost into health to fuel her teleportation and later tattoo-runes and confirming the specialization to |Merge| without slowing down.

Geria shook her head. “It is probably only the PvP-effective group that they originally sent after me. LJay’s group is probably who they are after but I can handle those unless they bring along a bunch of tier-two reserves, which will take time.”

“Like Danis and Firehand?”

“Like Danis. Firehand is stuck in tier three until he automates any physical defensive enchantments. He instead complains that he cannot find them mana-nonrestrictively without, quote, ‘going off-theme.’”

Deyana groaned. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“I wish that I were. I was in charge of DPS tier-ratings.”

“It might be in my favor, but I already hate it. Can you catch me up on who you think’ll be in the area or come after us?”

There weren’t a lot of surprises in Geria’s answering list, but there weren’t none, either. At some point after she’d stopped keeping up with the information from guilds that wouldn’t sell to her, The Alliance had managed to pick up one of the truly skilled Runewriters that occasionally appeared. Castien, the same woman who’d made Geria’s weapons, appeared to be one of those truly skilled players who went beyond, getting the game’s level two certification.

Only the first and second out of a theoretical nine Runecrafter’s Trials were actually available, and the association and in-game government absolutely refused to give any information on where the third might be found beyond “elsewhere.”

The fifth and seventh were also available there, but nobody ever took them as they each required the previous to be cleared.

Even still, maybe half of the people who primarily crafted in the game, already a comparatively small percentage, managed the first level, and of those only a quarter managed the second. Normally, a game that had been out as long as Rune would have guides on how to do things, but the trials in particular were structured as a series of problem-solving exercises that could be prepared for, but not memorized or looked up mid-test.

The benefits were absolutely worth it, though; the first trial granted access to most of the guild’s rune record for easy lookup and the second gave access to the ability to view the theoretical effect of a rune-group whether it could be activated or not.

Castien had taken that ability to the extreme, using it to create a number of complex effects with the distinct downside of the vast majority of her guild being completely unable to understand exactly what they were supposed to be using.

Finally, after bouncing around some thoughts in her head for a while, Deyana spoke again. “I’m going to either need to leave Don behind or bring him in on this. It was fine when nobody knew me, but…”

Geria clicked her tongue and Deyana prepared herself to be disappointed but was surprised. “Bring him in. I won’t buy him items, but if you want a rune that will get used for his stuff feel free to ask. It is not like I lose anything by having you diversify slightly more.”

She nodded at that, but they were getting too close to the city for talking to be anything but practical communication.

They shifted around the edge, staying out of practical sight by sweeping through old and failed construction along with more wild areas, Geria wiping out any monster that Deyana failed to one-burst with a single orb and her sword.

It wasn’t enough, given the lower level of the monsters nearer the city, to really move her experience bar, but that wasn’t the point. They hit the entry-road further from where they’d been and directly headed into the city, slipping into one of the basic shops as they did.

The items available there weren’t anything special, but as they were buying to disguise anyways, it wasn’t too difficult for Deyana to shift over to a longish light grey coat that covered her armor and contrasted with her typical color choices, along with more closely-fit jeans and a pair of fluffy fleece-lined boots she wouldn’t have been caught dead in in other circumstances. Changing her ponytail to a braid she didn’t hate took slightly longer, but combined with a couple of minutes to shift her posture to a slight forward-hunch, she thought it would be enough to pass by anyone looking for her specifically.

Geria had apparently had similar ideas.

Unlike her, Geria had decided to shift the coverage of clothing she wore extremely, wearing a t-shirt and loose jeans and had apparently taken the rest of the time to find one of the places that handled hair and add a wavy aqua blue peekaboo highlight.

While that was enough of a change to be difficult to recognize, something about it tickled at the back of Deyana’s head until she realized the issue.

Neither of them had anything runic visible at all.

Her sword went to Geria, its sheathed form generic enough to avoid suspicion, and Geria handed her staff over.

While it wasn’t correctly sized to her, they’d decided to look like fairly new players and a discrepancy that small was less than damning. Besides, the Alliance members hadn’t seen the staff in use at all, so it was one of the few tools they had between the two of them that they could use in disguise.

The two of them managed to slip into the teleportation circle area around the time a group of Alliance members came running out of it, and Deyana gave them a slightly worried wave.

That was enough for them, and after a short discussion, half of their number ran off towards the city entrance that she and Geria had used while the other half stayed put.

Neither group recognized them, though, and the two were allowed to slip through without so much as a word spoken to the watching group.

Upon arriving in the large city that she’d originally spawned in, Deyana made sure that they were out of primary sight before she groaned and turned to Geria. “We need to be able to look like mid-levels. I’m going to need a bunch of staples or you’re going to need to buy them, and either way it’s going to be a mess.”

For the first time, Geria looked a little bit daunted, and Deyana could see the math going through her head. “I can’t get everything staple, obviously. What will you be focusing on?”

“Standard meta and nothing else for a bow user, so projected or imparted durability and momentum or inertia increase plus some random garbage for arrows and a target selector. I’ve got most of what I need to look like an electricity caster, but I’ll need a connection major and want an explosive gas material for tricks. For you, what’d be your preference, knowing you might need to actually fight with it?”

Geria thought for a minute, then blew out a breath. “I’ve thought about being a sword-user, but I’m not good enough at close range for that to make sense. Could you do a polearm?”

“Yeah. Slashing or stabbing?”

“Stabbing.”

“More corseque or more ji?”

The was another minute of pause and Deyana watched Geria’s eyes unfocus as she probably looked those words up before answering. “Ji. And are you really adding this on top of all the other creations you plan to make?”

“Then for that I’ll need [Copy] or [Duplicate], but I think I can cheat the rest with |Merge| and things I’ve already asked for or have. For defenses, probably [Redirect] and or [Nullify].” Deyana thought for a moment, trying primarily to phrase her answer diplomatically. “And the fact is that whether I want to or not, a large part of staying under the radar here is just going to be looking like random people instead of the ones they’re searching for. I’ve got a couple of plans underway, but they’re really just buying time to hopefully complete this quest and make being difficult more trouble than it’s worth.”

Geria shook her head. “That is not why I asked. How long are you planning to stay here and how close to your VR limit is that going to push you?”

“Oh. Probably six or so hours tonight to finish the ones for Don and my two sets, plus another four or so tomorrow morning. That won’t touch my VR limit, though, I’d need to pull all-nighters and get one of those expensive coma-pods for that.”

Not that she would, but the thought had occurred before. The part-disgusted part-impressed look that Geria was giving her only confirmed that holding back more specific information was the right choice.

“How good is your Concept?”

The “language” of VR, Concept was the name people called the non-linguistic communication that they’d opened up. It was also known for being extremely difficult for most people to communicate in with any sort of direction or intentionality, getting caught in loops of explanation and prone to falling apart with the complex interconnectedness when the person trying to use it was used to “thinking” in language first.

People usually only bothered with it when they wanted a “shared” language or to design something in the pods.

Alex considered herself “decent.” The AI rating system called it something like “excellent,” but there was more than enough room to improve.

“Good enough.” Alex replied, adding a dismissiveness to her tone that she knew people took to mean somewhere on the lower end of average. “The real issue is school, which means I’ll be missing the entire middle section of the day and I won’t know how things are developing in the meantime.”

Geria froze up, then seemed to relax in that intentional way she recognized as resignation. “I normally would never suggest this…”

Deyana just raised an eyebrow. She had thoughts, but preferred to let Geria finish her statement.

“If we share pod codes or phone numbers, I could log in before you and check.”

“I’ve been logged in before you these past two days,” Alex responded, neither affirming nor denying the implied question.

“Only by an hour or so, which I can more than half-cover by just jumping in earlier. If we’re bringing in Don on this too, we wouldn’t need to shift things around that anymore, either.”

Deyana nodded, then smiled. “I agree, honestly. I wasn’t going to ask you to do that, though, ‘cause it means you stand to lose more if they somehow manage to set up an ambush.

Relief flickered to indignance to acceptance to something that was harder to place. Finally, Geria sighed. “Alright. I’m going to get you those runes and log out for tonight, because some of us still have semi-normal VR limits. I… suspect we’ll be pushing them, these next few days.

“Probably, yeah. Sorry.”

Geria gave her a tired look. “You didn’t start this.”