Return of the Runebound Professor

Chapter 892: A quick demonstration

Noah’s plans had changed.

He’d been expecting to have to do a little modifying of his strategy. That was no surprise. It was a natural aspect of any plan. Nothing ever went exactly how one would have liked it to. He wasn’t anywhere near optimistic enough to believe that all his students would have magically just been in the same area and simply sitting around waiting to hear his music over the thunderous din of the gargantuan crowd.

His original hope had been that word of a musician would be enough to reach their ears. After all, if any of them caught wind that someone with a violin was playing music, it would have been a dead giveaway as to who he was. At least… that had been his hope.

He’d hopped up onto a table and started playing. That had drawn a few eyes. Most of the other mages around him in the seemingly endless crowd were all just speaking. But by the time he’d gotten through his first song, it struck him that he hadn’t garnered anywhere near the crowd he’d thought he’d have.

There were only a few dozen people watching him. They seemed to be enjoying the music — which was certainly a nice feeling — but that was it. None of them were showing anything more than cursory curiosity or general enjoyment of the song.

And only when his confused gaze cast out across the room, searching for why he didn’t have a larger audience, did Noah realize where he’d gone wrong.

He’d had forgotten to account for something.

They weren’t in Arbalest anymore.

He wasn’t the only musician in the hall. There were others. Some looked like they were part of the Church of Repose and working as tournament staff. They stood around the edges of the room with string instruments and flutes. A few of them even looked to be playing, but Noah couldn’t even begin to hear them over the immense roar from all the conversations filling the room.

Noah wasn’t even the only musician amongst the competitors. From the table, he managed to spot at least three other people in the crowd with some kind of instrument on them. He was pretty sure someone even had multicolored maracas on their hip.

That brought his song to a halt. For a moment, Noah couldn’t do anything but stare. Arbalest had completely convinced him that he was basically one of the last musicians wandering around. That music had been functionally banned due to its connection with Formations.

But this was Obsidia. And it seemed they weren’t nearly anywhere as scared of Formations here as they had been in Arbalest. They must have been far, far more commonplace. That really should have been wonderful news. It meant music wasn’t banned or taboo anymore. The sheer implications of that were incredible. There would have been a thousand different things that Noah wanted to check if he hadn’t discovered this particular fact at this particular moment.

Unfortunately, he had.

And unfortunately, at this very instant, it meant only one thing.

He wasn’t nearly as unique as he had been. Playing a normal song wasn’t anywhere near enough to get his students’ attention. With how big this room is, there was practically zero chance they would just happen to overhear him. Noah needed people talking about him.

Frankly, what he needed was a legend.

And he didn’t have one.

Not, at least, as things were right now. Only a few people in this room had actually seen him fighting. Nobody knew who he was. His song was nothing more than enjoyable ambiance fighting to make itself heard over the din of the crowds. Something had to change.

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And that something was his plans.

He wasn’t the biggest fish in the pond anymore. A random Formation wasn’t going to cut it. It was only now really dawning on him that there were probably a dozen different Formation masters scattered through the crowd around him. The only thing currently making him unique was the fact that he had a fancy black coat and a weird mask.

That and the fact that he was standing on a table. Nobody else was doing that.

But in a sea of people this large… he could have taken a page out of Bird’s book and stripped down to his birthday suit, and it still wouldn’t have been enough to get anyone’s attention. It just would have gotten him kicked out of the masquerade.

He needed more.

Much, much more.

Noah drew on his magic. At the back of his mind, he was more than aware that this wasn’t going to be attracting the kind of attention he wanted. But he was going to need a very significant amount of magic if he wanted to get people talking about him.

Magical energy poured through his body and into the bow of his violin as his song intensified and grew louder. Power twisted into being in the air around him. Almost instantly, the people in the crowd milling around him spun in his direction.

Even with their domains suppressed, the volume of his music had nearly just doubled in instants. Anyone standing right next to him couldn’t miss it anymore. But that wasn’t nearly enough. Noah pulled on even more magic. His Runes trembled.

Hollow Symphony activated. It layered itself in with his magic, taking the power he was putting it out and expertly weaving it into the Formation at speeds that should have been impossible. The volume of his music grew louder still. The Formation regulated its intensity, casting the sound outward while ensuring people too close weren’t being deafened by the song.

Noah and Hollow Symphony drank from every single scrap of power he had to strengthen the Formation. With the size of the hall, he was going to need something huge. New instruments joined into his song, mixing in with the song of the violin in a growing orchestra. A piano started to play, joined shortly afterward by a singing harp.

He’d certainly gotten people’s attention. The small crowd he’d gathered had magnified in just moments. There were hundreds of mages all turning in his direction. Noah didn’t even bother trying to figure out what they were thinking. It didn’t matter — and he was too focused making sure the massive Formation he was creating didn’t fall apart.

Even with Hollow Symphony doing an enormous amount of work to keep everything together, this wasn’t a small undertaking. He was trying to get the attention of every single person in a hall that was so large that the ends of it didn’t even seem to exist.

He had absolutely no delusions about his chances of actually playing loud enough for everyone to hear him, of course. He just had to get people talking. It didn’t even matter if they loved or hated the music. As long as people were talking about a masked musician… he won.

Noah’s very soul poured itself into the song. His hand moved as fast as it possibly could, little more than a blur as it made his bow dance across the strings of his violin. The world faded away as he gave himself entirely to the music and his runes. Nothing else mattered. He could feel something deep within him stirring, as if waking up from a heavy sleep, but that too was pushed into his music.

A few slivers of the Beyond itself managed to slip into the mix. Noah hadn’t been planning on adding that particular ingredient into the mix, but when his entire soul was active, it was hard not to. Hollow Symphony fortunately separated the power into its own thread, allowing it to weave in with the rest while ensuring it remained fully separate and unable to corrupt the rest of the song.

Noah was only dimly aware of the results of his song. His soul was so immersed within the music that he could have sworn he’d entered a state of full merge with his runes. But he didn’t even have the mental capacity to try and figure out what that meant.

All that mattered was the song.

And then the world slipped back into place. Noah played the final note of a song that he didn’t even know. The Formation he’d build faded away, having been unwoven in the same way it had been created. It definitely would have made quite the point if he released all the magic he’d gathered and tested just how powerful the Imbuements that doubtlessly covered the ground and walls of the banquet hall were. But that probably wouldn’t have been very well received by anyone else in the room.

Noah’s’s lungs ached for air and sweat had started to prickle against his back. He didn’t even know how long he’d been playing. It couldn’t have been for too long, since he hadn’t depleted his magical reserves too badly. He supposed it didn’t matter.

Everywhere he looked, people were staring in his direction. It was hard to tell exactly what any of them were thinking.

His gambit had worked.

But it might have worked a bit too well.

Not everyone was just staring. More than a few mages were making their way toward him, and they didn’t all look friendly.

Ah, shit. Time to go.