Speed Is King

“Good girls. Speaking of powering up, have you two taken a look at the Runes which I had given you to study? We need to be able to draw those Runes within our own bodies using our energies, if we want to have a chance of breaking through to the Emperor level.” Elliot said.

“Oh, those strange figures? Yes we’ve actually spent hours every night studying them. They are… How do I say this…” Jennifer said…

“It’s alright. As I said, they’re extremely difficult. I can’t draw even the simplest one properly too.” Elliot sighed.

“You can’t?” Jennifer asked him in surprise. “Strange.”

“Yes, I can’t. It’s too difficult. And what’s strange?” Elliot asked.

“Strange because… What I wanted to say was that the Runes don’t seem to be as complicated as you said. I’ve already mastered drawing three of them.” Jennifer said, and then pointed to Jessica. “That freak over there had already mastered drawing seven.”

“HEY! Who are you calling freak? I’m no freak. Those Runes may look complicated, but they’re actually pretty easy to understand if you group them together and make stories out of them! Even a preschooler can probably do that.” Jessica said defensively.

Crash.

The weight of Jessica’s words smashed powerfully onto Jennifer’s “talentless” soul and her mouth twitched lightly as she held back a deluge of withering words to shower at Jessica. “Even a preschooler can do that? Good. Very good, Jess.” Jennifer narrowed her eyes at Jessica and started to hatch all sorts of evil plans that she could do to get back at her.

But if Jessica’s words affected the “talentless” Jennifer who could “only” master three runes that much, just what impact would they have on Elliot, who had mastered a grand total of zero?

Jessica’s words smashed powerfully onto Elliot’s “completely talentless” soul and tackled him to the ground. They then proceeded to stomp on his soul, unpinned a grenade, stuffed it down his soul’s mouth and slammed his mouth shut so the grenade could do its job properly.

The psshhhhhh sound was the sound of his soul’s innards leaking out of the thousands of holes created by the grenade.

Elliot’s physical mouth dropped open.

“H-how?” Elliot managed to ask after a few seconds. He found it incredibly surprising that his sisters could actually do things that he couldn’t.

Afterall, they’re his baby sisters…!! It wasn’t too long ago that he had to completely lead them completely by the hand and do everything for them…

“Could it be that they are outgrowing their need of me…?” Elliot wondered with a slight pang of loss.

But at the same time, an indescribable sense of pride also erupted within his heart.

“Of course, if there are to be geniuses arising from humanity who could easily master the art of drawing runes, it would definitely be one of my sisters.” He thought with great satisfaction.

“As I said, just think of them as a huge picture with stories. Take a look at this Epic rune-“

“Wait. The seven runes you mastered. They couldn’t be… Epic runes, could they??” Elliot’s jaw dropped so fast again that he felt like he was a toy robot with a loose screw in his jaw.

“Of course they are epic runes. Why would I waste time learning the uncommon ones?” Jessica replied rather impatiently. She didn’t like getting interrupted when she had her teaching hat on.

“Aunty Khellendra said that we only need to learn the basic Rune components, and then common or even mythical runes are just a matter of combining them. Just like letters and words. So by learning epic runes first, I am actually learning several common and uncommon runes in the process! It’s much faster this way!”

Poor Elliot could only gape and wonder at the obvious fallacy in her argument.

Even preschoolers know that to master difficult words, you first need to master the simple words! Whoever heard of little kids learning how to spell “discombobulate” first rather than “car”?

But then, she was also the one who mastered SEVEN runes, and he, zero. So he couldn’t just point out that she was wrong in her logic, could he?

“So anyway, look at this epic rune here.” Jessica said.

Elliot was about to open his mouth to clarify if her seven runes were all Epic runes, or did she include the common and uncommon runes that were found within the epic, when she glared at him fiercely.

He shut his mouth again and smiled at Jessica, the rune-mastering monster, weakly.

He waved his hand at her to indicate that she go on in her explanation.

“See this whole section here on the top right? It’s a story about a little boy who lost his parents in war.

See? This is the boy and these two things here are his parents. Now this is the war… and poof. Parents dead. Look, the boy is sad at first. And then he got angry at the empires who constantly war against each other. So he trained hard, got strong, and he assassinated the two emperors.

But alas! After the two emperors died, the land descended into chaos, and more war occured! Millions died! The boy regretted his decision to kill the emperors. Now he had no choice to make amends.

How did he choose to make amends? He decided to unify the land under his rule so that there would be peace.

This top section here is actually an uncommon rune called – Peace through War.

It carries the sentiments of the story I just told you, and it is a predominantly aggressive peacekeeping rune that would exert its full power when executed with a heart yearning for peace.” Jessica explained.

Elliot was completely dumbfounded.

“How the heck did she read a story out of the huge mass of squiggly lines and shapes?” He thought to himself.

Even under Jessica’s careful explanation, Elliot couldn’t make heads or tails out of the Epic rune. It was a jumbled mess in his eyes!