It had been a good change of pace to start working out again. She regularly worked out through sparring, but that was a whole different kind of workout than the muscle building she used to do. All the nonsense she had been going through was finally starting to come to a head and this was a great way to blow off steam. And unlike her first workouts, she now had a good idea of what to do.
She had paid some money for a couple of makeshift dumbbells out of a wooden rod and clay. She curled them both at the same time and got a good look at herself in a mirror. She noticed that she would swing her body a lot to lift the weight which definitely made it easier. “It’s probably not a good idea to swing though,” she thought as she set down the weights, “it’s like I’m cheating.” She flipped the weights around and tried doing some reverse curls. These were significantly harder with the same weight and made her sweaty with just a couple sets.
The next exercise for the young rune wright was to do some sit ups. She wasn’t looking for a six pack or anything, but there was definitely some improvement to be had here. She only knew of the one workout for the stomach and that was sit ups. She laid flat and put her hands across her chest and lifted up towards her knees. She didn’t do her lower back any favors by coming all the way up to her knees but she was a long ways away from having perfect form.
Stuffing her weights in the corner of her home, Luvi thought of how she could improve her magic since she still felt like there was room to grow. She definitely wanted to produce more powerful runes, but at some point she had to stop thinking about how to work stronger and instead figure out how to work smarter. It was anyone’s guess as to when she would actually see a noticeable boost in power. There had to be at least half a dozen runes that she hadn’t learned yet and each seemed more mysterious than the last.
Luvi was not quite ready to learn her next rune, mostly because she couldn’t afford to spend entire days or weeks meditating to try. After what had happened with trying to learn her last rune, she wasn’t sure when she would have the gall to learn another rune without guidance. She had been right to be cautious about everything related to magic so far. Luckily, Luvi was in her home and away from any distractions. She could meditate as much as she’d like without interruptions. She thought back to her father who seemed to have some kind of vendetta against meditation. He was highly disciplined which was probably his saving grace but he seemed to think that having a calm mind was a waste of time. That probably explained why he was always so irritable and was quick to dish out punishment and criticism. It couldn’t be healthy to live like that.
The one who had initiated her had a certain way of placing and activating runes had always been different than hers and now maybe she was skilled enough to figure out what those differences were. When Luvi put runes on her body they were typical just standalone. A strength rune on her arm would have mysterious other symbols that would spread around the limb, but when he placed runes there were always a series of lines connecting all the symbols together and on top of that they were activated without touch or sound… which made her believe that he had some way of doing it mentally. This led the younger rune wright to believe that there was something about those lines that had made his runes special.
Figuring out how to trigger a rune mentally wasn't as difficult as she thought it would be. She found that it took a lot of mental focus, but being good at meditation meant that focusing came quite naturally to her. She practiced tying runes to mental triggers for about half an hour before she thought that she had the hang of it. At least she'd made some progress with her studies today.
Luvi was confident that there was much that had simply been forgotten to teach her. That, or she was expected to learn how to do it herself. She thought and thought about how she could connect symbols and runes together. She knew that she could only put one rune on a limb but obviously there was able to add more. If the man had used the lines to somehow link the runes together, perhaps there was a way. Luvi meditated so hard in deep thought that she actually fell asleep. Only once her head slammed into her pillow did she wake back up and get back to it.
Now that she had slept on it, she had a good idea about how to go about doing it. Creating two runes at once wasn’t the easiest thing to do. It required focus, it required ether, and above all it was difficult to put the same amount of ether into each of them. It was why Luvi often found herself applying one rune at a time. She had never tried putting two on the same limb though. She traced her fingers onto a single leg and tried not to get frustrated at having to inscribe two different runes at the same time, which was even more difficult than inscribing two identical runes simultaneously. She simply could not bring her brain to let her left and right arms conflict each other like this. Maybe if she were some kind of calligraphy expert it would have worked, but she was not one of those.
Since creating two runes at once didn’t work, it was time to try something new. She was going to try writing two runes consecutively. Using only one hand this time she wrote in the rune of strength onto her leg and then moved on to writing the rune of endurance right next to it. It did fuck all though. The rune of strength went over just fine but the rune of endurance didn’t do anything because, as expected, the limb could only hold one rune at a time. It was all a big waste of ether.
Luvi felt like she was right on the precipice of figuring out this mystery. There had to be some way to connect the two runes together. Her teacher had put so many as three runes together on to one limb. She knew for a fact that he had at least a couple runes on his body when they trained together. Every time she thought about how the man’s runes looked it always came back to the mysterious lines that linked everything together.
Luvi growled in frustration and drew a strength rune on her other leg. She then used a single line and saw that the rune didn’t go into effect. It looked like as long as she kept channeling her ether into drawing the rune she was free to keep writing. She then quickly scribbled out the rune of endurance and released her ether connection. Her leg felt kind of weird, as it felt completely different than having just one rune put on it. She wondered if putting these chained runes on her limbs somehow induced them with more stress.
There was only one thing left to do: test the results. Luvi stood on the enhanced leg and started doing hops. She could definitely jump higher but what about the endurance? She performed a series of kicks that would have definitely caused her legs to ache and felt hardly any muscle fatigue. She was going to go ahead and consider this test a success. It really had been as simple as drawing lines between the runes to connect them together. She chained even more runes on to her other leg and now she felt like she was some kind of actual athlete.
Luvi wondered if there was a way to chain together even more runes. She had to resist the urge to go outside and run to give these legs a test drive. She thought and thought but she couldn’t really think of what other runes she could chain. She figured that strength and endurance were good on their own, but what point was there in putting something like numbing into the mix? Was she just going to make a limb so strong and devoid of pain receptors that she could just tear herself apart with no inhibitions? Maybe she could tie together sensory runes onto her head and experience sensory overload, if the situation called for it.
Just for the sake of trying it out she inscribed a strength rune to her chest, drew a line, and drew an endurance rune. She then tried to draw another line but found that she simply could not do so without expending way too much ether as she’d already practiced a lot already. “Let’s call it good enough for now,” she said with a sigh. If she wasn’t ready to chain together three or more runes then it simply wasn’t meant to be. Now that that was squared away she burst from her home and ran around outside. She was going to have some fun before the runes ran out.
