Briant had decided that they would continue on saying that he wasn’t afraid of a little opposition, but from what Anne had explained to him about the quality of mercenaries this was more than a little resistance. Though Anne had not been able to explain to him what magic here was like as she had limited exposure to it herself she knew it was an indicator of skill. Soldiers magic, which apart from Charles’ flamethrower most of his runes looked like, was more common but even that was restricted to at the least high level officers and very capable mercenary. Scholars magic on the other hand which Anne had only ever heard about was even less common being completely restricted to nobles. Even the crude camo they had worn was expensive outside of very specific areas.

The enemy that wanted this caravan gone was powerful if not physically then economically and Charles needed to be ready to fight anything that they had. So, he had been working ever since he discovered that they existed. He had developed two runes one for detecting enemies and another that would be his long range method of attack.

At the moment Charles was a mainly close range fighter with limited ability to detect an ambush, so Charles started looking for ways to fix these problems. The detection was easy, he created an eye rune on the forehead of his helmet then created path’s to chanel the information to a second rune near the eye holes on his helmet which would project the information as visible light into his eye. The rune worked okay it was designed to let him see farther and heat signatures and such, it did it’s job but the range wasn’t the best being barely longer then where he could normally see, at least he could see heat signatures lighting silhouettes up even when they were hiding. The Attack rune was much harder.

He started with the inspiration of a crossbow or slingshot, the idea would be that it would generate a rope of pure force and use it to fire a projectile of some kind. He first developed some anchor runes filling them with stability and placing them on another rotating rune for aiming. The runes for generating the rope was more difficult and but he managed to develop a solution. The rune to generate force rope similarly to the field for defence and offence were to energy intensive to use, so he made several small runes dedicated to creating sturdy force threads and an additional rune to weave them into a strong and much less expensive rope. There were two ammo types he developed for the crossbow rune to fire, one was a two tired slim arrow, the front was filled with whatever he wanted to damage his foe while the back was filled with concentrated force mana. It got its initial speed from the crossbow but when it hit it’s target the back releases all of it’s force causing the front of arrow to pick up speed and pierce through the first and a second target. The second ammo type was a thicker barbed arrow, it was filled with heavily compressed force mana concentrated on the tip and had barbes on the front to prevent it from coming out of the target and barbes on the back to prevent it from going through, once it was inside the target the whole thing exploded as the force mana on the inside was released. Both the slim arrow and the explosive arrow were very effective so Charles considered the crossbow rune a success and placed them on his shoulders with an aiming system connected directly to his brain.

Charles sat at the front of the caravan scouting for ambushes and realised he was neglecting his advantages, the menus and the masks, he hadn’t checked any of the menus since he got here and the masks had been sitting around in his inventory along with the travel gear. When he checked the menus there really wasn’t anything interesting or new, but the masks had a lot of potential. With a little bit of expirimentation into velcro runes he managed to find a way to attach masks to his armour that counted as equipping them.

Rune masks were an advantage that he needed to capitalise on, but they were different from the standard runes he made. The masks required emotion and memories while the effects they had were more passive like the only mask he had enchanted so far the mask of the grieving family. First Charles started with the basic masks stuff like combat buff or stealth buff, a quick rune on a epoxy demon mask gave him a solid combat buff. The menu read mask of the combat driven demon when worn it greatly increase his strength the longer he spent in combat and the buff would last until he took the mask off. At first the buff barely increased his strength but two minutes into a fight he would be at double strength until he took it off. For the stealth mask he choose a mask that looked like a cyclops with its eye shut. When he put a rune on it the menu read, mask of the cursed cyclops when worn people are unable to perceive you at first they just don’t perceive you when you get closer their body forces them to be unable to perceive you (covering their ears, turning their head) and the last stage they start mutilating their bodies to prevent them from seeing you (they gouge their eyes out). As long as Charles kept in stealth it seemed like a pretty good stealth buff.

Charles was confident in his runes and his new masks so he equipped the demon mask, activated the detection rune and prepared for a fight at any moment.