Runebound Reverse Tower of The Dead-Chapter 111: Hew. [Ambush]

It hit him the way it always did, like someone threw a heavy blanket over his senses. Colors dulled. Sounds sank. Even the air felt thicker, as if the world had decided to forget him.

His senses became duller, but so was his own being.

He felt smaller in a strange way. Not physically smaller, but less... defined. Like his edges blurred into the background. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

His presence became low, and the world’s tone turned gray.

He moved close to the entrance of the stairway leading to the floor he was currently on and tucked himself into the shadow of a broken cubicle wall and a leaning filing cabinet.

He positioned the stairwell so that it would spit them out right in front of him. He adjusted his grip on the axe, testing the weight again. The smoldering edge had cooled slightly while he climbed, but it still held a faint warmth like a promise.

Sound echoed, though for Kael it sounded far and deep, like someone speaking from the depths of a well.

Footsteps. Scrapes. The clack of something hard against concrete. To him, it was muted, but he could still track the rhythm. Three sets. Not a crowd. Not yet.

Three figures emerged from the stairs.

Three goblins, two of them carrying what looked like wooden chair feet with nails protruding from them, while the last one had a stone axe. Their weapons were ugly, improvised, but that didn’t matter. A nail in the throat was still a nail in the throat. A stone axe still split skulls.

They were coming down in a relaxed manner.

Relaxed meant they didn’t expect danger up here. Relaxed meant they thought they were the hunters. Relaxed meant their guard was down.

It was a rare sight to see goblins in the day, but even though the office building was bare of most of its walls, there were still a few that could hide the sun from burning the goblins’ eyes.

Thin slices of shadow made little safe lanes for them. Kael noticed how they favored those lanes, sticking close to broken walls, avoiding the open gaps where sunlight spilled through. They weren’t smart, but they had instincts.

A few words or what felt like language echoed from their mouths as they were coming to Kale’s floor.

Harsh, clipped sounds. A back-and-forth. Their tone rose and fell like bickering.

It sounded like an argument, but there was no aggression in it.

More like complaining. Like they were annoyed they had to check for a noise at all.

Kael didn’t even need to know, nor wanted to know,w what they were thinking or saying.

He didn’t care about goblin opinions. He cared about goblin bodies hitting the floor.

He had a weapon and a target.

Just then, Kael moved in front of the three goblins.

He stepped out smoothly, not rushing, not lunging. He simply appeared where there hadn’t been anyone a second ago, his silhouette coming into their line of sight like a glitch.

They didn’t see him until it was too late.

Not because he was invisible, but because the world had been trained to ignore him. Their eyes slid past him until their instincts screamed that something was wrong.

After all, [Presence] didn’t turn one invisible; it only reduced their presence.

And when Kael was right in front of them, two of the goblins seemed to yelp like a cat that just got its tail stepped on.

The last one completely froze.

Its stone axe dipped, and its mouth hung slightly open. Fear didn’t register as a thought for it. It registered as a physical shutdown.

A good target.

Kael raised his hand and swung down.

That’s what it should have happened, the axe going up, going down, a goblin is dead.

The motion felt clean in his head. Simple. Efficient. The way fights were supposed to be when you had a better weapon.

The result was definitely not what Kael expected, however.

When the Axe was mid-swing, he felt his arm about to be ripped out of its socket.

The weight surged like a sudden gravity trap. His shoulder screamed. The gauntlet held, but his joint felt like it was being punished for daring to swing.

The axe came down clean, cut through the goblin clean, and into the ground digging halfway through the axe’s edge.

The goblin split like wet wood. And the ground embraced the weapon like it always belonged there.

He tried to wrench it free and felt the resistance like the world had thickened around the metal. His wrist strained. His elbow locked. For a fraction of a second, he was stuck in the worst position possible.

Not only that, when he believed that once his weapon was stuck in the floor, the other two goblins were about to jump on him.

He saw their bodies tense, saw the nails on the chair’s feet lift, saw the stone axe goblin’s companions shift from surprise to violence.

He saw death and miscalculation. All of this happened in less time than it took to blink twice.

Without notice or intent, without any form of planning or execution, a sudden burning wave of raw fire and heat exploded from the embedded axe head and slammed into the two goblins, blasting them away far and outside the building with fire following after them.

It wasn’t a fireball. It wasn’t a neat projectile. It was a wide, brutal vertical arc of raw heat, like the air itself had been turned into a weapon. The heat hit Kael’s face even from the side. It roared past him and ripped through the goblins as if they were paper.

Their bodies blistered, darkened, and then turned to charcoal and ash in less than a second.

There wasn’t time for screams. There wasn’t time for falling. They were simply erased into burning ruin.

And all that fell from the building were a few bones that were too sturdy to completely burn.

Bone clattered somewhere below, faint and distant. The only proof the goblins had existed at all.

Several notifications popped up in front of Ludwig.

The first thing Kael registered wasn’t even the words.

It was the flood.

The system reacted like it had been slapped awake.

Windows stacked, one after the other, swallowing his vision.

[Your [Fire Imbued Axe] lost 86% of its durability].

[Your Fire Imbued Axe is on the verge of collapse. Please find a way to repair it soon.]

[Your Runic Gauntlet lost synergy with [Fire Imbued Axe] due to its near-collapsed situation]

[You have slain three goblins.]

[You have obtained 3 Soul Cores]

[Congratulations! You managed to produce a feat that no one had done in the Reverse Tower of the Dead.

You have managed to channel Runic Energy and changed the structure of a simple rune to a more complex expression.]

[You have discovered the Runic Word [ᛚᛁᚷᚣᚦ] Flame Wave.]

[Your understanding of [ᛚᛁᚷᚣᚦ] is still too low to apply it to fire-aligned runes.]

[You have obtained the title [Runeweaver]]

+5 Int

[Your mana is in critical levels.]

[Presence has been forcefully removed.]

Just when Kael read the last part, he came to understand the implication of what he had done.

It wasn’t just that he’d killed three goblins. It wasn’t even that he’d done it fast. It was the wording. The system’s wording was never casual. If it said "no one had done," it meant he’d stepped into a line that most climbers never even saw. He created something new, something grand, something epic. But for a moment it all felt too... flimsy.

Especially with the mind-shattering pain that followed afterward from having his mana reach critical levels.

It hit him like a delayed punishment, like his body had waited until the job was done to collapse the bill onto his nerves.

His vision pinched. His teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. It wasn’t the ache of muscle fatigue. It was deeper, sharper, like his blood had turned to needles and someone was dragging them through his veins.

His stomach rolled. His knees threatened to give.

The world, which had gone gray under [Presence], snapped back into cruel clarity as the rune was ripped away from him. Sound rushed in, loud and immediate. The building’s creaks, the wind, the distant howls that had been muted before now felt close enough to touch.

And somewhere inside that rising noise, Kael understood the worst part.

That flame wave hadn’t been "free."

It had cost him almost everything he had in one swing.