Laying Low and Looking Deeper

The area lacked everything except paths. Ruger took turn after turn until even he had lost his bearings. Only then did he feel safe enough to ease up.

He stopped running flat out, but he had no intention of stopping altogether. His two stubby legs kept pumping at a steady pace, as if he meant to fling his feet right off. He had always thought kobolds' timidity was a weakness that kept them from growing strong. After what had just happened, though, he could understand it.

A kobold's cowardice could save his life. Most wouldn't freeze in fear or do something stupid like stand rooted to the spot. Once frightened, they scattered, instinct driving them to run as far as they could.

Just as he was doing now.

With his little storage bag, even fleeing was easier, he reflected.

To a kobold, this place was full of spacious homes. Openings on every side meant plenty of escape routes.

He reached a broad spot that looked promising. Unfortunately, it was only a junction of three passages, so it had openings on just three sides.

He steadied himself.

Something had been wrong with the little Insectfolk's expression when he left.

The only problem now was food, but that could wait. He could go hungry for a while. After all, kobolds had another talent—enduring hunger—and he hadn't put it to use in ages. He would lie low until tomorrow, then feel his way out.

"How are you doing, my emergency rations?"

He opened the rearing pouch, brought it close to his face, and spoke softly.

The large insect egg actually wobbled, as though trembling.

Could this thing really understand him?

The little Insectfolk had spoken to him in the Cavern Common Tongue, so he had used it to tease the egg. Before that, he had assumed the two brothers communicated through pheromones or something similar.

After teasing it for a while, he calmed down too.

He sat against the cave wall, took out the spellbook for Freezing Ray, and went back to reading.

Learning a spell from scratch did not mean starting with the Spell Model, as he had imagined. From what he had learned earlier, a Spell Model was a special kind of rune that could be either extremely simple or extremely complex—an artificial construct of its own sort.

Without an Inheritance Scroll and the help it provided, building a good Spell Model through one's own efforts meant first understanding a heap of smaller, more fragmented things. Fail to grasp even one of them thoroughly, and building the simplest Spell Model became difficult.

Those little things could be thought of as smaller runes. They were strange elements that manifested when Mental Power beyond the mundane clashed with everything in the world—its events, patterns, and principles. They could even be called the world's way of expressing itself. If the world were a person who could speak, a human might say one sentence at a time, while the world could speak a hundred or ten thousand at once. It was an imperfect analogy, but these little things, and even the larger runes in meditation methods, were words and phrases spoken by the world that people had caught, seen, and understood. Perhaps they were no more than punctuation marks.

These little things looked adorable, but they were so mischievous they wore him out. Merely observing them steadily drained his Mental Power.

At first glance they all looked alike, yet each was entirely different. Even breaking one in two and putting it back together changed it. They could blend or repel one another, and combining several produced further variations. If his understanding of any one fell short, constructing a Spell Model would grind to a halt. And that was the easy part: others had already charted the path. The book laid out the exact range and identified every little troublemaker this spell required—not one more or less, a complete and reliable set.

To a Grand Wizard, a book like this might be a beginner's guide.

He scratched his head as he read, working to understand and master each piece. The pages turned more and more slowly. Sometimes he spent an entire day without turning one. Fortunately, becoming a Wizard Apprentice had transformed his Mental Power and made his mind a little sharper than before.

Then a thought struck him: Looked at another way, wasn't he talking to the world?

The world, however, was an even worse chatterbox than Old Gold Tooth. It had been talking without pause since its birth. What Ruger spent days taking apart and studying might be no more than half a word it had uttered. The gap might be greater still—too vast to describe. With such a lopsided exchange, calling it a conversation was a stretch. When they studied and explored these runes, they were more like people trying to touch the world's echo.

He looked up at the crystal lamp in the corner. Inside its hourglass-shaped frame, the diamond-shaped crystal had completed another cycle, its glowing end shifting around once more.

In the blink of an eye, he had gone three days without food. He told himself again and again that excessive caution had nothing to do with it. His absorption in teaching himself a spell for the first time, combined with a kobold's gift for going hungry, had simply overcome his appetite.

At last, he decided to get moving.

After days of self-study, he had accumulated quite a few gifts for Half-Man.

Perhaps he could bring Half-Man a worm as well. He just wasn't sure whether the fellow would take a bite and have it leak out somewhere.

He did not follow the route he remembered.

After hiding for so many days, he couldn't afford to stop being careful at the very end.

It took him half a day of feeling his way around, but he finally emerged and reached the familiar little hunting ground in the ravine without trouble.

The first thing he saw was a beautiful, dark-skinned figure with pointed ears.

It was probably a Dark Elf, just as Old Gold Tooth had described.

At least by human standards, the elf was quite beautiful. Kobolds and Lizardfolk might disagree.

Ruger kept a low profile and did not cast Stinking Skin Spell when he emerged. He looked like an ordinary little kobold.

So he did exactly what suited an ordinary kobold.

He turned and ran.

The dark-skinned elf stood about as tall as a human. Even standing casually, the elf held a straight-backed posture with a sharp, commanding air. The elf heard Ruger's footsteps but did not look over at once, only glancing his way when he started to flee.

That was precisely the effect Ruger wanted.

He was just an ordinary kobold. At least, that was the first impression he wanted everyone to have.

This Dark Elf had traveled far from home alone and was wandering through another subterranean people's territory. That alone said the elf was formidable.

There were plenty of other places to catch worms. He could leave that one to the elf.

When the elf still had not pursued him after some time, Ruger slowed and softened his steps. Thinking back, he realized the pointy-eared figure had seemed to be surveying the whole ravine, not looking for worms to eat.

Ruger decided not to concern himself with that. He would catch his worms, hurry back, and master the spell.

He had already decided not to wait until he became a Level-Two Wizard Apprentice. Once he learned this spell, he would set out and search the two nearer places where Wizards had fallen. He had the Little Crybaby Bug to thank for the map to those Wizards' legacies.

The last time he parted from the little Insectfolk might well have been the last time they ever met. If danger had struck, it would surely have centered on the little Insectfolk. Ruger had only been an incidental passerby.