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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/ralo_ramone on 2025-11-04 18:38:35+00:00.

Prince Adrien and Althea cowered like little children. Their natural confidence slipped away the moment they realized what I truly was. [Foresight] highlighted the details of the scene. Color returned to Prince Adrien’s face, and his heart raced; the pain and exhaustion lifted from his body as adrenaline shot through his veins. Althea clutched his arm, her eyes jumping from me to the shards of the bed pillar lying on the floor. For the first time since I met them, they looked small. Neither spoke for a long time, but my brain wouldn’t stop.

Maintaining my secret identity wasn’t my greatest priority anymore. To face the Corruption Cycle, Prince Adrien’s support might be more important than anything else, and for that, I needed to keep him alive.

“S-since when?” Prince Adrien asked as he regained the ability to speak.

“Just before the royal army arrived at the Great Hall,” I replied, pointing at Althea’s dress. “But only recently I managed to create things like that. Can’t say the System is a great teacher. I’ve been figuring things out for the past two years.”

Prince Adrien opened his mouth again, but any sound died before he could utter a single word. For Ebrosians, two years was an extremely short ‘cultivation’ period. I gave him a moment to process the situation.

“What is your quest in Ebros, Robert Clarke?”

That was a tricky question, but I decided I wasn’t going to lie.

“The Fountain follows a cycle of death and rebirth. We are coming close to its death, and the System expects an era of high Corruption ahead of us,” I explained, skipping the fact that the System Avatar’s plan was just to fix the malfunctioning subroutines and lie low until the cycle reset. “I’m here to help people survive.”

Prince Adrien blinked. Then, I felt the sensation of a thousand little needles probing me. He was using a detection skill on me. Not one like [Foresight] that only caught external stimuli, but one like [Identify] that pried into private information.

“Are you using a skill on me?” I asked.

Althea looked at Prince Adrien in panic.

“Y-you shouldn’t be able to feel anything,” Prince Adrien said.

The greater the mana pool, the easier it was to detect the currents of mana.

“I-I’m an Arbiter. I’m using [Lie Detection].”

Arbiter was a Prestige Class from the Scribe line. A Scribe turned into a Diplomat instead of a Scholar, and then the Diplomat turned into an Arbiter. There was little information about Arbiters in the Book of Classes—as with most of the Prestige Classes—but they were described as a support class with strong perception powers and mild magical aptitude ranging from non-elemental attack magic to illusion magic. Although not confirmed, the author of the book believed Arbiters also had hypnotic skills.

“Am I lying?” I asked.

“No, but you aren’t saying all the truth either,” Prince Adrien cautiously replied.

I sighed. Prince Adrien and Althea weren’t ready for the truth that the System was created by some chubby dude with a sparse mustache and a strange obsession with yellow polo shirts. They weren’t ready to know how much the System tinkered with one’s brain. Nor the fact that the System decided to abandon this generation to their fate.

“There are more dangers lurking, but those are mine to deal with,” I said.

Althea and Prince weren’t prepared to know about Runeweaver-on-Runeweaver violence either.

“Our survival through the Corruption Cycle will depend on the kingdom’s unity. We need someone with power over the dukedoms. Someone who can make unorthodox decisions if it comes to it.”

Someone who doesn’t want power. Someone I can trust.

From the moment we sealed our deal, I knew Prince Adrien was the closest to the right person I was going to encounter. The Marquis and Lord Osgiria were too greedy. Lord Gairon was too prideful. Lord Herran was too much of a loving father to put the well-being of the kingdom above his sons and daughters. Lord Vedras hated the Osgirians and was carried away by revenge. Lord Jorn and Lord Kigria didn’t have enough political power to move the kingdom. Lady Evelisse was a conspirator and a manipulator.

Prince Adrien was the closest to an alright guy I was going to find among nobles.

“You need to live,” I said. “Show me Baram’s Runeblade.”

Althea jumped forward. “Even if you sever the connection, with the amount of corruption he has … will he be fine?”

I felt the tiny needles probing my skin again, but the sensation disappeared a moment later. Prince Adrien didn’t want to know.

“It’s over there, Runeweaver Clarke. Please do as you want,” he said, pointing over my shoulder.

“There’s no need to be so formal. I’m just a school teacher from Connecticut.”

Leaning against the corner of the room was an old sword in an even older scabbard. I knew the scratches on the metal were purely cosmetic. That same sword had allowed Prince Adrien, a man with a support class, to cut down hundreds of monsters during the Lich’s Monster Surge in Farcrest.

I grabbed the scabbard, careful not to touch the handle. If the legends were accurate, the Runeblade wasn’t locked to a certain bloodline like the Aias Sword, so I wasn’t going to burst out in flames if I touched it. However, the Corruption covering Prince Adrien’s body was enough warning for me to be careful. I took a deep breath and used [Identify].

Baram’s Cursed Runeblade. [Identify]: A cursed sword created by Runeweaver Baram capable of cutting mountains and separating seas. Enchantment Threshold: ???/???. Status: Degrading.

I didn’t like the last part, but if the sword had existed for centuries, I could only assume it would last a few more. I focused on the handle and activated [Rune Identification].

Many System prompts popped in front of my eyes with Rune names. User. Activation. Detect. Depletion. Repel. Release. Echo. Resonate. Guide. Absorption. Bind. I also gained insight into many more Rank I Runes that I haven’t encountered before. Pulse. Dampen. Transform. Aura. Amplify. Shape. Even with all the known runes, my brain couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. We used the same alphabet, but Baram’s Runeweaving looked like constellations in the sky.

The sudden surge of information made me dizzy, so I had to close my eyes for a second while the System kneaded the knowledge of the runes into my brain. When I opened my eyes again, I found myself in front of a small universe of runic circuits. Although it wasn’t a physical sensation, I could only describe it as the Runeblade screaming like a live wire, and considering the amount of power flowing through the sword, it might be a live mana wire as well.

The more I focused on the runes, the more my vision blurred, as if my brain refused to make sense of the higher rank runes engraved in the metal. Runeweaver Baram was either a genius or a monster. I couldn’t envision myself conducting so much magical energy into a single enchantment circuit.

I tried to recall the sensation I felt when I used the Vampiric Rune on the Mage Killer Gloves to extract the Red Corruption from Rup’s body. More than a sensation was an understanding of the rune. Vampiric was just a label for a deeper meaning I couldn’t grasp with my mind alone.

I relaxed, letting my eyes run free over the runes. Huge chunks of the enchantment made no sense to me. More than half of the runes were just smudges in the periphery of my vision. Other chunks were eerily familiar, although I couldn’t say with certainty what their purpose was. Byrne had told me the Runeblade was an anchor between Earth and Ebros, but that didn’t make the enchantment any clearer.

I was absorbed by the runes. No matter how hard I tried to count them, there were always more. Thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Then, when I thought I couldn’t go any deeper, I saw it. Like a curtain being pulled aside, I saw a mana spire floating in the middle of nowhere. The environmental mana curved down into the void, following the spire’s direction.

I was a tiny speck of dust in front of a black hole.

The spire roared as my mana sense quivered. I kicked my metaphorical feet to get away from the swirl. I flew up just to get away until I reached the top of the spire. There was a person there. Or the projection of a person. I recognized him.

Prince Adrien was fixed in place with chains that came out of nowhere, the spire seemingly protruding from his chest. His body was transparent white, made out of mana, and his mana pool—a swarm of small mana particles—was exposed in the middle of his chest. A powerful flux of mana passed through Prince Adrien’s astral body, powering the spire.

I followed the flux up into the void just to find a lone distant star. The Fountain.

No wonder Corruption had killed Prince Ragna and was now eating Adrien’s body alive. Prince Adrien was the convex lens that gathered the mana necessary for the anchor to work. He channeled more power than any ordinary human should.

“Avatar! Are you there?” I called.

“I am,” a feminine voice replied behind me.

When I turned around, I found a woman dressed in office clothes, her hair in a high bun secured with a pencil. I recognized her instantly. She was Rebecca from HR, the woman with hypnosis skills who had enslaved a flock of dragons and wanted to become the queen of the world, and one of the original Earth humans to arrive at Ebros.

“Don’t look at me like that, it’s me, the Avatar,” the woman added.

Strangely enough, she—he?—‘felt’ like the Avatar.

“Why do y…

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