Literature / Return of the Runebound Professor

Go ahead. Kill him. We dare you.

"I just did magic. I can do–"
Four huge claws slammed into his head as the monkey swung its other hand at him, carving down through his body and cutting the rest of Noah’s sentence as short as his life.
It was his first death on this new world — but it would be far from his last.

Noah Vines died once. Standing in a queue for centuries to be judged didn't suit him, though, and then, when he finally reached the front, the goddess of reincarnation was attacked and the Waters of Life were corrupted. Now he's been reincarnated in a new world in someone else's body, with his memories intact and a mysterious rune stuck in his soul, and he doesn't stay dead when killed. Whatever shall he do with all this exciting new magic and endless retries? Sit in a tower and learn all there is to know? Nah, punching monsters sounds like much more fun.

Return of the Runebound Professor is a fantasy novel by Actus (who also writes Rise Of The Living Forge), published on Royal Road starting from May 2023, and updating daily (sometimes twice).

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The following lesser tropes are of rank 1:

A-L

• Ability Mixing: The path to magical power is to inscribe seven rank 1 Runes in your soul; fuse them into a rank 2 Rune, increasing your soul's capacity; gather seven rank 2 Runes; fuse them into rank 3; etc. For example, Noah combines Vibration, Wind, and Ash runes into Pyroclastic Resonance, which lets him control wind and ash through whistling. However, different combinations produce different quality results, and only ideal combinations will be stable enough to progress to the highest ranks. And once created, a Rune can only be undone by tearing it out of your soul, which causes damage proportional to how much you were relying on it. Until Noah discovers that the unique Sunder Rune embedded in his soul has the power to split a Rune into its seven parts, allowing him to recombine and test different combinations until he finds the perfect mix.
• Best Served Cold: Noah is sympathetic to Isabel and Todd's vendetta, but he firmly advises them to let it wait until they're ready. Neither of them is pleased, but they do recognise the wisdom of it.
  Todd: Better years and succeed than going now and failing.
• The Bet:
  • Garrick and Eline make a bet with Revin that Eline will outperform Todd and Isabel in the survival exam — with Eline's life as a stake.
    Revin: Everyone's always so willing to put their life on the line until push comes to shove and the reaper comes knocking at your door.
  • Lee is excited to visit a casino, but promptly blows all her money at a card game. However, she does manage to make some back when a man wagers that she won't be able to eat an entire platter of food within a minute; she finishes it within ten seconds. The pattern of losing and winning repeats several times, until she's eventually banned from the casino when someone tries to argue that one of her wins doesn't count, because the bet was that she could eat everything on the table, not just the food, and she responds by proceeding to actually eat everything; betting chips, cards, silverware, and even a woman's hat.
• Big Eater: Lee is always hungry. Her reaction to an attempted mugging in a dark alley is to pilfer the mugger's snacks. When she's advised that she can only have one piece of food per minute at a dinner, she picks up an entire roast chicken and calls that a piece. She helps Noah dispose of his corpses by eating them whole in one bite. That's because she's a Gluttony demon.
• Big Fish in a Bigger Ocean: Having reached tier 7, Alister expects to be the top of the heap, stronger than anyone else in the Arbalest Empire, to be treated as a god and see the noble houses quail before him. He's startled to be immediately confronted by someone much stronger, pinned down when he tries to resist, and told that tier 7 isn't as rare as he believed, it's just that he's no longer allowed to remain in the Empire.
  Garina: Once you get to a point where you aren't a complete waste, it's time to move on so you don't squish the playground on accident.
• Blood Magic: Blood Runes are very rare and strictly regulated, but the church Inquisitors sometimes have them, and can do things like tracking a blood sample to its owner. However, an Inquisitor has great difficulty in tracing Lee, who has rebuilt all her Runes with Noah's help, and has also chosen to live very differently from how her demonic nature would suggest. Her blood sample leads him to her general area but struggles to pin her down more closely.
• Booby Trap: Anyone who touches the Linwick ledger without having Linwick blood will immediately die. And anyone who uses it incorrectly will set off an alarm when they let it go. And stealing the book will cave in the whole facility.
• Bring It: Silvertide laughs at attempts to intimidate him.
  Silvertide: Do you have any idea how many times I've heard that? And do you know how many people who made that threat are still around? You'd best make your next attack count. You won't get a chance to make another one.
• Bringing Back Proof: Noah initially promises to bring back the head of a Slasher monkey to prove to his students that he knows how to kill them. But after realising how much of a mess it would make, he settles for bringing back a claw, with blood still on the root. The students try to protest that he could have bought the claw, but they're at least convinced enough to come with him so he can demonstrate firsthand.
• The Cavalry Arrives Late: It would have been really handy if Brayden had come just two minutes earlier so Azel wouldn't have needed to sacrifice himself for Lee.
  Noah: Well, I suppose it’s the thought that counts.
• Crippling Overspecialisation: The easiest way to fill your Runes and tier up is to infuse your soul with multiple copies of the same Rune. The second easiest is to get an assortment of Runes of the same type, so you only need to learn one type of combat. However, having just one element is guaranteed to make your Runes too unstable for the higher tiers.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon:
  • When Alister reaches rank 7, he's surprised to promptly be told that he needs to leave the Empire. Garina casually informs him that if he doesn't get moving, she'll rip his spine out through his backside.
  • When Bria decides that she's had enough and is going to kill Noah, she promises, "I'll rip your innards out and feed them to you before I choke you to death with your own intestine."
  • After a whole day of dealing with an Obstructive Bureaucrat, Moxie declares that if the next person they see isn't helpful, "I'm going to shove a vine down your throat and see what kind of flower you make when it sprouts."
• Deal with the Devil: Upon being offered a Greater Rune, Todd promptly decides that "You've bought me mind and soul." When he and Isabel much later learn that Noah actually is something like a demon, Isabel just laughs.
• Death Glare: When Noah deliberately taunts the fake Magus Evergreen by eating in front of her while she can't have any, her glare "couldn't have gotten any angrier but, if it could have, Noah suspected his skin would have started boiling beneath it."
• Demonic Possession:
  • Noah actually claims at times that he's a demon possessing Vermil, because even though that puts him in a dangerous position, it's still safer than revealing the existence of Sunder and his true nature as a reincarnated human.
  • It was revealed that there actually is a demon hiding in Noah's soul but Sunder had shredded the demon's soul and Noah unintentionally healed it. Whilst the demon wasn't possessing Noah it was influencing him to make him more angry.
  • True demons do exist, and can either possess people, or consume their bodies and shapeshift into them.
• Destroy the Evidence: Lee doesn't have time to eat Noah's burnt corpse before it's discovered, but she's able to remove his name tag so the body can't be identified as him.
• Distracted by the Sexy: It's difficult for Noah to contemplate serious topics like his Rune development while knowing Moxie is in the shower.
  There were two entirely different parts of his brain trying to be active at the same time, and feeding the wrong one was a great way to ensure absolutely no more work got accomplished today.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Arnold warns Moxie that if she apologises for the loss of his hands, which was her family's doing but nothing to do with her, then he'll throw her out of his shop.
  Arnold: I don't want any useless apologies. I'm well aware that you weren’t the reason this happened, so even if I did want an apology, it would mean nothing coming from you.
• Dungeon Bypass: Between his tremor-sense telling him where to go, and element control allowing him to both break through stone and slow his fall with wind, Noah is able to take a shortcut down several floors of Gentil's base hidden under a bakery, avoiding potentially dozens of fights along the way.
• Eating Contest: As a prerequisite to duelling Vermil, Magus Anthony is suckered into an eating contest against Lee, who can swallow an entire human body in one bite, and whose reaction to being told "only one piece of food per minute" is to take an entire roast chicken and call that a piece.
  Noah: Lee?
  Lee: Yeah?
  Noah: Now you can eat.
• Elemental Powers: The commonly available Runes include variations on fire, water, wind, and earth, along with more esoteric options like vibration. Once the Rune is in your soul, you can shape the corresponding element with your intent, forming wind blades, throwing fireballs, etc. Noah starts off with the Wind Runes he inherited from Vermil, but later pursues all the classic elements together, in a destructive form, combining volcanoes and earthquakes and tornadoes and floods to make the "Natural Disaster" Rune.
• Enemy Mine: Noah calls Father his enemy without hesitation — but goes on to say that they're, "Enemies who have recognized we both have bigger problems than each other and occasionally work together."
• Extreme Omnivore: Not only can Lee swallow things that should be too large for her (such as entire human corpses), Noah hasn't yet found something she can't eat, even wooden-shelled fruit. Or pies that are still in their metal tins, or a glass bottle of orange juice ("I like the way it crunches") including the cork.
  She's definitely eyeing that food vendor's cart — the literal cart.
• Failed Attempt at Drama: Revin's stealth causes him to mostly show up as a dark blob, and as a result, Noah's students attack him when he appears, thinking he's a monster. After things are explained, he's not really offended, but he does insist that it ruined his dramatic entrance — so he heads off into the forest to try it again.
• Faux Affably Evil: Gentil tries to project an image of a benevolent grandfatherly figure, but if people don't play along, he tends to lose his temper quite quickly and the act breaks down. Also, in Noah's opinion, his phrasing tends to come across more like a creepy pervert.
• Feed It a Bomb: One of Noah's finishing moves is to force as much ash as possible down an opponent's throat and then combust it, with the contained pressure wreaking havoc on even quite tough foes. He takes out a Root Fiend safely this way, and later uses it on Gentil while grappling, which kills them both — but Noah can recover.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Noah's plan to improve cooperation between his students and Moxie's is to throw them into a situation where they have to work together against a monster too dangerous for any one of them alone, with the adults apparently missing.
  Noah: Traumatic events are great for bonding. They should make it a mandatory part of every school's curriculum.
• Flight: Theoretically, with enough power and fine control, a wind Rune would allow its wielder to fly. However, it is much easier using a specialised tool, typically a flying sword. It still needs to be fed with wind magic, but it takes care of many of the mechanical aspects, plus it gives something to stand on. Noah gets himself a cheap one that gives a rather bumpy ride; it takes several retries to learn to ride it properly, but it's a rush once it works.
• Girl with Psycho Weapon: What could add a whole new level of mayhem to Lee, who disregards all social norms, eats small animals like squirrels whole, and thinks you're not properly flexible until you can turn your head around 360 degrees? How about giving her a battle axe taller and wider than herself? Olive is so impressed by the sight of her holding it one-handed that he spends several hours arranging a portrait session, complete with her smashing up a pumpkin while he role-plays its screaming. He also gives the group a hefty discount on the axe, which Lee uses to wreak havoc and mayhem on monsters.
  Why would a pumpkin scream? You know what? I don't want to know.
• Glass Cannon: When Noah sees his students struggling and spending almost all their magic to create a magical shield before facing a monster, he tells them that it would be much better to fight as he does, without a shield. He's more vulnerable, but he has enough magic available to actually fight and kill the monkeys, rather than getting one shot off and then fleeing if it didn't work.
  Noah: You don't need a shield if you don't get hit.
• Glomp: After Noah uses his new Fragment of Renewal to heal her soul damage, Lee hugs him so hard he can't breathe. She figures if he dies, it's not that big a deal.
• Grail in the Garbage: Thanks to Sunder, Noah has very different priorities in purchasing Runes than other people do. A Rune with strong components, but poorly combined, is trash to most people and would permanently cripple their growth, but since he can split it apart and use the pieces separately, to him it's a valuable source of ingredients for making a stronger Rune. As a result, he's able to snap one up at an auction for a bargain price, and no one else even bids.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Two women attack Noah at the same time in a coordinated fashion, which he notes "would have been quite effective if Moxie hadn't grabbed one of them by the leg with a vine and ripped her into the air, whipping the poor woman around and slamming her into her compatriot with enough force to shatter bone."
• Groin Attack: The first blow properly landed on Stigman, Gentil's assassin, is a punch from Lee that leaves him staggering and clutching his nether regions.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Vermil's notes mention that he dismissed a Greater Vibration Rune because all it could do is shake things. Noah, however, knowing more about how sound waves work and how much damage high frequency vibrations can do, recognises that it's actually an excellent option, albeit needing some time and practice. Being able to rattle monsters with a touch, so hard they crack their teeth, is just the start.
• He Knows Too Much: Moxie is aware that she knows enough about Emily that she'll never actually be retired from her job as Emily's guardian and teacher. She'll just continue in the role until she gets executed.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: The jaguar's ability to teleport through shadows makes it very difficult to fight, appearing from nowhere to strike at someone and then disappearing again. Noah briefly pins it down by flooding the area with light to dispel the shadows.
• Hive Mind: A monster with a Master Rune is able to dominate related monsters over a wide area, guiding their movements and sensing what happens to them. Which means that after Noah kills a lot of monkeys, the Hellreaver Ape controlling them is quite annoyed with him, and since the monkeys have sometimes managed to kill Noah and absorb part of his soul, the ape has a connection to him that it can use to torment him.
• I'm Having Soul Pains:
  • Although Noah revives after death, he suffers soul damage in the process — especially if he was killed by someone else, who would have thus absorbed some of his soul's energy. He gets a headache for hours and can't access his magic until it passes, and the damage takes days to fully recover; if he dies too many times close together, the cracks in his soul get worse. After he uses Sunder's active effect to attack someone while disembodied, the damage is so extensive that he's comatose for weeks and then has to find a way to draw on Renewal's power to heal it.
  • Adding Runes to your soul and combining them has the effect of expanding it — but the Runes become the scaffolding, so removing them, whether by ripping them out or fully imbuing them into Catchpaper, causes damage. Lee tears out two inferior Runes she made herself, in order to absorb some of the jaguar's much better Runes, but she's then unconscious for days, until Noah forms a new Rune to fix her.
• In Vino Veritas: Noah has a drinking session with Brayden, but kills himself in the bathroom partway through to flush the alcohol from his system, giving him the chance to question Brayden.
• It Amused Me: Revin's motives are generally either "Because I felt like it," or something extremely petty, like playing life and death games so someone will cook breakfast for him. Likely justified by him being a very powerful former servant of Decras, pretending to be a simple Rank 3.
• Kill and Replace:
  • Skinwalkers can only possess dead bodies, so they tend to kill people and then pretend to still be alive. Noah becomes alarmed when one of his corpses goes missing, and sure enough, a double of him later turns up. He covers it up by telling his students it's an experimental clone, not wanting them to wonder where the second body came from.
  • Demons can shapeshift to impersonate people. However, with the right magic, their presence can be detected regardless of disguises.
  • Wizen has the ability to turn bodies into puppets using plant magic. Ulya freaks out when her friend Will is injured and she sees plants inside him instead of blood.
  • Noah himself has effectively pulled a kill and replace on Vermil, the original owner of the body he's in. Noah didn't actually kill him, just stepped into his body immediately after he died from other causes, but he chooses to impersonate Vermil rather than publish the truth. Except he's not going to be a lazy corrupt pervert like Vermil.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: The first time Noah dies in Vermil's body, he's in the middle of marvelling at how he just managed to use a Wind rune, when a giant clawed monkey carves his head apart.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Noah is caught with his pants down due to having died (which only recreates his body, not his clothes), and makes up an excuse about naked fighting being more efficient because things can't snag. Then, next time he goes hunting, he realizes that he forgot to bring a change of clothes at all, so if he were to get killed and his corpse lost, he'd have nothing. Meaning that now he needs to actually go naked until it's time to return.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • There's no way that Noah, Moxie, and Lee, even together, can win a straight fight against Magus Evergreen. But they can create an opening for one of her subordinates who doesn't like her much to assassinate her, then arrange for the guards to promptly catch the killer and execute her in turn.
  • Father is uncharacteristically helpful when Noah is making plans to confront one of his rivals, and Noah realises that that's because either one being taken out is a win for Father.
    Moxie: He's only helping because the only one that wins from a conflict like this is the one that wasn't in it.
• Literal Disarming: Barb flees from fighting Noah when he cuts her arm off with Sunder — but she can't heal it even with a top-grade potion.
• Logical Weakness:
  • When facing a monster that can teleport through shadows, Noah briefly pins it in place by flooding the battlefield with light and leaving it nothing to work with.
  • Magical shields only stop magical attacks, not mundane ones. Gentil's shield is rank 5, but it doesn't stop Noah from propelling himself forward with a high-speed wind to punch Gentil in the nose.

M-Z

• Magikarp Power: Greater Runes have much more capacity for growth than lesser Runes, but they fill much more slowly, and until they gather a fair bit of energy, they have very little effect. Everyone still wants them, because they have vastly more potential, but it's difficult to use only greater Runes, since you won't initially have enough power to kill monsters and efficiently gather the energy you need.
• Master of None: Noah is surprised and a little disturbed to realise that his Natural Disaster Rune, while powerful, becomes less stable when he uses it, while simple runes like True Shift are consistent. He suspects that including so many types of energy in a rank 3 Rune was over-reaching and that a set of more narrowly focused Runes would work better.
• Meaningful Rename: Both Isabel and Todd came originally from noble families, but those families were falsely accused of theft, murdered, and the survivors blacklisted so that even speaking their family names is punishable by death.
• Metaphorically True: Noah's students are very surprised to see him alive and well despite recently taking a mortal injury. Isabel assumes it was because of the healing potion that she can see on his belt. Since the potion gourd in question is his Respawn Point, she's not entirely wrong about it saving him, albeit not at all in the way she thought.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Noah gains a reputation as the only teacher at Arbitage still at rank 1. However, with a better work ethic than his body's original owner, plus his New Life in Another World Bonus, he grows quickly. Bria confronts him thinking he's still rank 1, when he's actually rank 3, and he proceeds to trounce her and almost kill her before she escapes with an emergency teleport item.
  • Lee outclasses the man who tries to attack her in a dark alley, so thoroughly that she barely even notices he's trying to stab her. She does take his blade and stick it into his own stomach, but she's paying more attention to the snacks she can smell in his bag, and she figures that him staggering away instead of trying to reclaim his pouch of jerky counts as giving it to her.
• Mundane Utility: It's too awkward to use a quill while walking, so Noah instead draws on his recently formed Deafening Thunderstorm Rune, burning dots and lines into his paper with summoned lightning.
  It wasn't the cleanest, but it was more than functional as a writing tool if he didn't mind being a little sloppy.
• The Needless: The soul energy obtained from killing monsters can substitute for food and sleep, allowing Noah to keep training for days. On occasion he loses track of when he last ate food.
• New Life in Another World Bonus: Noah inadvertently absorbed a very special Master Rune, "Sunder", from the demonic figure who attacked Renewal, expanding his soul's magic capacity and granting him unusual abilities. Its passive effect binds his soul to the gourd where he revives. Its active effect lets him split things apart — including monsters, people, and even runes.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Defying this is Garina's job. Having reached tier 7, Alister expects to be the top of the heap, stronger than anyone else in the Arbalest Empire, to be treated as a god and see the noble houses quail before him. He's startled to be told that tier 7 isn't as rare as he believed, it's just that he's no longer allowed to remain there.
  Garina: Once you get to a point where you aren't a complete waste, it's time to move on so you don't squish the playground on accident.
• Not Afraid to Die: Naturally, once he's accustomed to respawning, Noah really isn't afraid of dying for a good cause. He does try not to be entirely casual with it, since it has side effects, but as he tells his students, fear is important yet should not entirely control you.
• Not What It Looks Like: Moxie takes care of Noah for weeks while he's bedbound and mostly unconscious from soul damage, so Lee manages their students. Once Noah's up and about again, though, the group all go to a restaurant together, where Emily mentions, "Training with Lee was really fun, but are you going to train us now that Vermil isn't in your bed anymore?" Naturally, this was at the exact point where a waiter was approaching their table.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Revin appears to be completely useless as a teacher, spending more time posing with his scythe than actually explaining anything — but if a monster should happen to sneak up behind him while he's standing dramatically, he might just happen to fall over at that moment and conveniently behead the thing. His student, meanwhile, hates him with a passion and fears death at every moment of Revin's Training from Hell, but does in fact become extremely competent at fighting monsters that should be too strong for him, even in groups, for hours at a time. Revin makes sure to give the impression that his only contribution was to shout unhelpful advice, even after one of his little "accidents" puts an end to a monster that was genuinely beyond James' capabilities (and James had already made a good showing, which Revin will never admit).
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The secretary at the Arbitage Office is...unhelpful. She routinely eats six-course meals at her desk, and won't talk to anyone before she's done. Which doesn't necessarily mean she'll talk to them after she's done; she's likely to take an hour-long break away from her desk at that point. If you outlast her, she will then saddle you with a stack of paperwork as tall as your forearm. And after you've taken hours to complete all of that, it will probably turn out that you're in the wrong building.
  Noah shook the first paper in the pile at her. "How are these even slightly relevant? They’re asking me the length of my forearm. Why would I know that? I'll show them the length of my middle finger instead."
• Out-of-Character Alert: Inverted by Lee, who shows so much humanlike affection for her friends that she's wildly out of character for a demon, throwing an Inquisitor off her trail. Even when he sees how much she can eat, which is a sign of her true nature, he still doesn't think she's likely to be his target, because she visibly cares about people.
• Pass the Popcorn: Renewal is initially incensed by Noah stealing some of her power, but as he continues to advance and even improve on what he has, she and Decras end up just watching things play out with a box of chocolates between them.
• Power Perversion Potential: Most of Vermil's runes, before Noah started revamping them, were Wind runes. Someone who knew Vermil suspects he was hoping to lift girls' skirts, and from what Noah has heard about him it's plausible.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner: Noah pulls one out right before exploding himself and his opponent.
  Noah: I'd say I'd see you in hell, but they won't let me stick around.
• Pulling Themselves Together: In the fight with Evergreen Noah's Sunder Rune starts to do this to Noah when his body is ripped apart. Black ropes manifest and pull his body back together even when he loses his head.
• Pummelling The Corpse: Noah is about to finish off a rock monster that Moxie has seized, but instead, she slams it into the ground over and over until it's shattered to pieces.
  Noah: You aren't mad at me, are you?
  Moxie: Why would I be mad at you?
  Noah: No reason. Just making sure.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Not only does Lee have youthful earnestness down pat, she can actually shapeshift to make her eyes larger and more puppy-like. Noah is helpless to do more than grumble in the face of her power.
• Reincarnate in Another World: Noah was supposed to reincarnate as a baby, without any memories of his previous life. But due to the goddess Renewal being attacked and the Waters of Life tainted just as he arrived, things went wrong; he retains his memories and has been placed in the body of a man who had just died.
• Relationship Upgrade: Moxie commissions a violin for Noah, but the crafter insists that she should pour her own magic and intent into it — and when Noah bonds to the violin, he can feel the emotions that went into it and how much she cares for him. Moxie didn't realise that would happen, but when she asks what it showed him, he replies, "This," and kisses her.
• Respawn Point: Noah is bound to the gourd of apparently poisoned healing potion that killed Vermil. Any time he dies, his soul is sucked back to the gourd and a new body forms there. If he expects to die to a monster, he'll generally make sure to throw the gourd some distance away so he has a chance to sneak off after reviving.
• Rigged Contest: Not only do Noah's students get attacked during their survival exam by an unreasonable number of monsters, but none of those monsters are any of the ones carrying the tokens that the students are supposed to collect, forcing them to bunker down and fend off the waves without any relevant rewards to show for it. It backfires on Eline, however, who only knows that the group has killed lots of monsters, and figures they'll be a lucrative source of tokens. Instead, they're too much for her to handle, and take the many tokens she has gathered.
• Secret Test: Noah does start to become suspicious when an assassin approaches without trying to conceal its presence, and only seriously attacks once he's ready. Figuring out that it's not human and is being controlled makes him even more so. It's not until he shreds it, though, that the (rather annoyed) controller appears and admits to testing him for the academy's advanced track — and tells him that he was supposed to be judged on how long he lasted, he wasn't supposed to win and destroy a puppet that took months of work.
• Shoot the Builder: The Torrins commissioned a very powerful Magic Staff for their family head, Magus Evergreen — and then, once it was completed, they cut off the craftsman's hands and cauterised the stumps, so that he could never make an equivalent weapon for anyone else.
  Arnold: I included a lot of things in our contract, but I foolishly forgot to include anything about leaving me uninjured.
• Shoot the Messenger: Contessa is terrified of delivering the news that Moxie is being recalled to be executed. She isn't killed straight away just for that, but she isn't safe either...
• Shout-Out: When Ferdinand challenges Garina's right to remain in the Arbalest Empire when she's above rank 6, she retorts that she is the one who enforces that law. "Don't try to quote it to me. I was there when it was written."
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Lee is entirely unfazed by Azel the demon trying to persuade her that her friends will just use her up and then cast her aside.
  Lee: You know what? I think you're unhappy.
• Sinister Scythe: Rezin habitually carries a scythe, which he mostly uses for dramatic poses, although he's extremely effective with it in ways that look like accidents when he needs to be.
• Sinister Suffocation:
  • The Combustion master Rune gives its holder control of oxidation-reduction reactions, which means that among other uses, it's possible to still the air in someone's lungs and stop them from breathing. It's a nasty surprise for Noah to be on the receiving end of it, but once he acquires the Rune, he finds it to be a useful way to hinder a combatant without immediately killing them.
  • Moxie's vines can form an impromptu noose or garrote if an opponent isn't careful. Making them strong enough to resist cutting can take a lot of energy, though.
• Soul Eating: Any time someone kills a monster (or a person), they get a rush of energy that is actually absorbing part of the victim's soul, and can be absorbed into any runes held in the soul of the killer. Since Noah has a Respawn Point, he gets to experience this from both sides, suffering much worse soul damage if he's killed by a monster than if he commits suicide.
• Spot the Imposter: Subverted when Noah comes face to face with his own body, in front of his students. He quickly deduces that a skinwalker has taken over one of the corpses he's left lying around, but he doesn't want to explain to the kids how it is that the corpse got there while he's still alive, so he pretends that it's an experimental project in cloning himself. The copy plays along rather than be immediately marked for death.
  "So which one is the real you?" Isabel asked.
  "Me," Noah and not-Noah replied at the exact same time.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The oversized jaguar-ish monster that gets a whiff of Noah is apparently intelligent enough to understand both strategy and human speech (although it doesn't have the right vocal cords to reply), and hunts the party long past the point where they've left its territory and a normal predator would give up, toying with them and trying to split them up so it can take them down one at a time.
• Taking the Bullet: Lee knocks Moxie out of the way of a blood magic arrow that would have instantly killed her, but there's not time for Lee to get herself clear. Then Azel of all people takes the arrow for Lee, complaining bitterly about how she was too nice and twisted her demon runes into something less selfish, to the point where it even affected him. He dies admonishing Lee to make a name for herself so he has something to think about in the queue for reincarnation.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: Vermil's death resulted from a healing potion that started to repair his disembowelment, but then caused him to drop dead and be replaced with Noah's soul. Noah isn't sure who it was that poisoned Vermil, but would really like to avoid getting targeted again. He eventually learns that it was Vermil's unwilling fiancee, hoping to get out of the engagement.
  Label: Thanks for everything, Magus Vermil. I hope this healing potion helps you out.
• Training from Hell:
  • Moxie's training, which she passes on to her students, involves running until you're exhausted, with mobile plants providing motivation as needed to keep going. Then, once you have nothing to spare, you expend all the energy from your Runes. Then the real work starts, having to work together to avoid a stronger pursuer, with nasty consequences if you're caught.
    Moxie: Between being exhausted and forcing people to fight monsters without Shields, I'd say you’re the more barbaric one.
    Noah: It was effective.
  • Moxie is still arguably not as bad as Revin, whose idea of training James is to set fire to the whole area, driving every nearby monster into a pained frenzy, then pose dramatically while shouting helpful criticisms like "Do something other than run!"
• Translator Microbes: Noah only gets fragments of Vermil's memories, but he does gain a complete understanding of the native language, to the point where he doesn't even notice the difference. (He can still write English, though, to keep information secret.)
• Try Not to Die:
  • Inverted for Noah, when he's planning to fight a Great Monster and Lee cheerfully encourages him to "Go kill yourself!"
    That's got to be the first time anyone's told me to kill myself and genuinely meant well by it.
  • On a later occasion, Moxie settles for "Just make sure that, if you die, you don't leave anything behind."
• Unstable Equilibrium: Becoming truly powerful requires optimising the combinations of Runes in one's soul — but once seven Runes have been merged to form a higher ranked Rune, the result can't be undone, only torn out with associated soul damage. So most people have to stick to whatever lesser Runes they were able to assemble, and can't advance very far before their flawed collections of runes become too unstable to merge further, while rich noble families hoard the greater Runes and ideal combinations that they've discovered and can set up a foundation for reaching rank 5 and up. Moxie is part of a noble house, but not the main branch, and is deliberately forced to assemble an imperfect set of runes so that she'll never become powerful enough to threaten them. She's over the moon when Noah helps her fix them, Sundering the flawed combinations and letting her recombine them into seven perfect Runes.
• Victory by First Blood: Alexandria's spar against Yulin is meant to be swords only, to first blood. Loophole Abuse ensues on both sides. Alexandria has body imbuements that make her skin extremely hard to cut, Yulin pulls out a magical blade that's basically a lightsaber and claims it still counts because it's a sword, and ultimately Alexandria makes her bleed by hammering her knuckles with a hilt instead of cutting her.
• Wants a Prize for Basic Decency:
  • Moxie refuses to be impressed that Vermil actually repaid her small payday loan (even though she wasn't necessarily expecting him to be that honourable).
    Moxie: Do you want a written letter of congratulations for doing the bare minimum?
  • On a later occasion, when she needles him about how he'd already know the answers to his questions if he read more books, he retorts that he's progressed from not bothering to read anything at all, to at least reading dossiers.
    Moxie: Do you want a medal?
    Noah: Yes.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Sunder can cut not only the body, but the soul, resulting in severed limbs that can't be regrown. Barb is intimidated into running away when she loses her left arm to Noah's formation, but even a potion worth 50000 gold can only fix the bleeding and seal the stump.
• You Do Not Want To Know:
  • When Lee asks if it's a bad idea to let Revin study Magus Evergreen's very powerful magic staff, Moxie's only answer is, "Don't make me think about it, please."
  • The first time Moxie uses the red vines of her Bleeding Forest rune to kill a man, Noah can't tell what actually happened to him, except that the vines got inside his helmet and then he's dead with blood trickling out. Moxie guesses the direction of Noah's thoughts and advises him that he doesn't want to know what the vines did.

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