Restart Again: Volume 1 by Adam Scott (pocket ebook reader TXT) 📕

of every speck of food and the cup was empty, I shoved them back out into the hallway. It would be a stretch to say I felt full, but having adapted to the new diet plan, my hunger was sated for the time being. Assuming I was correct in my estimation of how much time had passed since I was originally imprisoned, I had about twelve hours of solitary confinement before my next meal.

“Alright. It’s time.” I spoke out loud as I began a brief calisthenics routine. I found speaking aloud to myself awkward and uncomfortable, but from prior experience I knew that it would help keep me sane in the long run. My stretches were a welcomed change of pace after sitting in the same position for an entire afternoon. With my blood pumping and my mind focused after the quick stretching regimen, I reached out and drew my sword from the air in front of me. The hilt was comfortable in my hand, a welcome extension of my arm. “It’s good to see you again, beautiful.”

As I examined the weapon in the dim torch light, my eyes paused on the runes inscribed down the length of the blade. It was an elegant improvement I had made to the Combat Enhancement system back in Alderea. After my initial training with Brusch, I sought out every knight and freerider I could find passing through our village and paid them everything I had for lessons. I learned with an insatiable voracity, and soon found that my random teachers could no longer present me with new problems. We would spar, and sometimes I would pick up a new sword technique or stance, but the Combat Enhancements stagnated quickly.

I inevitably found myself training through random trial and error. Some things were a natural progression; moving from Lesser Agility to Agility was a simple enough idea, though it was much more energy intensive. Evoking those enhancements until I could barely stand, day in and day out, slowly but surely increased the maximum amount of mana I held within me. I had started to wonder about the actual process of evocation as well.

Why would a knight stand across the battlefield from his opponent and loudly tell him exactly which enhancements he chose to use? The beginning of real combat was an embarrassing display in my eyes, with men trying to speak as fast as possible to gain a slight edge over their foe. I tried for weeks, in vain, to evoke even a basic enhancement with only my mind. Without fail, I could tap into the energy down in my core, but I could never activate it in a meaningful way without saying the words.

It was Amaya who solved the problem for me with an innocent and unrelated comment while watching me train. “How can you remember all those different enhancements? I would have to write them down and read them off a list during combat. I guess it’s good I’m not a fighter, isn’t it?” I had run off wordlessly, too excited to speak. At the forge, I found an engraving tool, and carved the simplified rune for agility into the end of my sparring sword.

With intense focus, I channeled my energy down the length of the blade to the rune. It flashed with a bright green light, and the enhancement activated instantly. I was so overwhelmed with excitement that I sprinted back at accelerated speed to the field I had left Amaya in and tackled her in a loving embrace. Finally, the door to advancement had opened to me.

It was a simple enough process after that to carve as many runes into my weapon as possible and start practicing. My skills grew rapidly: It only took a week to be able to activate any rune on the sword individually, without activating them all at once. Next, after memorizing their placements, the runes could be evoked while holding the blade facedown, the characters out of sight. Soon after that, just through manipulating the amount of energy I expended, I could cast Lesser Agility, Agility, and Greater Agility through a single simplified agility rune.

My advancements had slowed after that. My techniques were so far ahead compared to those of the knights I had met so far in Alderea that I shifted my focus to increasing my energy reserves, confident I could outperform any opponent in a one-on-one combat. Now, sitting in my cell with over a lifetime’s worth of extra experience, I saw how limited my scope had been. Why should I be limited to runes depicting the standard combat enhancements? How could I be limited to runes carved onto a weapon, and not another surface? My opportunities seemed endless...aside from the small issue of being locked in a cell.

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5. NEW HORIZONS

“Alright, time to get my thoughts in order. Make a list of tasks, evaluate the potential, and execute. Current ideas to test: Unconventional Enhancements, Incanting Spells, Unconventional Implements, maybe, oh! Maybe it doesn’t need to be an implement at all? Could a piece of paper work? The wall? My hand? My mind, maybe? What if…” I muttered to myself for quite some time, interrupting my own thoughts in a stream of consciousness sequence of ideas all firing off in my brain at once.

“Wait. Just slow down a minute. Start with something simple.” I chided myself, realizing how much time I had wasted thinking of plans well beyond my current capabilities. “The easiest thing to start with would be adding a new rune, but something more abstract. Fire, maybe? Inscribing a rune, though…” I took a moment to weigh my extremely limited options. Holding my blade out in front of me, I ran my non-dominant thumb across the edge, hissing at the pain.

Carefully, I traced out the basic rune for fire on the flat of the blade in blood. It certainly wasn’t elegant, but the rune was unmistakable. Drawing on my mana reserves I cautiously began to channel energy through my body. “Keep it