Chapter 126: Preparations

’Using the axe with the gauntlet feels all kinds of wrong. The cost is too much and the effect though nice, isn’t nearly worth the cost of mana… no, it’s Internal Energy now.’ Kael was both thinking and analyzing his own shortcomings.

He sat on the broken bed with his elbows on his thighs for a moment, staring at his right arm like it had betrayed him personally.

The gauntlet was still warm in places, not enough to burn through the lining, but enough to remind him that every “clever” combination had a price.

With the new rune in hand, and the tool he obtained he is slightly stronger than before. New tools will always bring about Improvement. But the new tools need to be understood first to be used.

Kael’s eyes drifted to the axe leaning against the table. It looked innocent when it wasn’t trying to bankrupt his energy pool in one swing. He tapped the rune in his pocket once, feeling its shape through cloth. Every time he got something new, the Tower turned it into a riddle. It wasn’t enough to own it. You had to learn how it wanted to be used. If you didn’t, it punished you until you either adapted or died.

He grabbed the axe and thought, “What if I add a rune to you too?” The idea crossed his mind, but then he immediately shook it away.

The thought was tempting, especially now that he knew runes could behave like words instead of rigid spell names. Still, he could already picture the outcome. More synergy. More power. More cost. And the axe was already Tower-aspected. Piling more on it without understanding would just turn it into a landmine he was forced to hold.

“You’ll simply be upgraded but I can’t use you in my right hand.” Kael was not ambidextrous. And swinging an Axe with his left hand would be far less impressive and powerful than using his right hand.

He tested it anyway, purely out of stubbornness. He shifted the axe to his left and did a dry swing. His wrist complained immediately. The motion felt backward, like writing with the wrong hand. He could brute-force it, sure. He could brute-force a lot of things now. But brute force was how you wasted energy and lost fights you should have won.

“Maybe if I switched the gauntlet to the left…” the idea came but also brought another idea with it.

The second idea hit harder, because it wasn’t about compromise. It was about removing the compromise entirely.

Kael who was sitting on the broken bed immediately stood up.

The bed frame groaned under the sudden shift, and dust fell from the ceiling in lazy specks. Kael didn’t care. His mind had caught fire, and unlike the Fire rune, this kind of heat didn’t burn him. It made him move.

“Hold on, what if both my hands had gauntlets in them? Like a fist fighter?” he thought.

The image formed with uncomfortable clarity. Two gauntlets. Two sockets. Two barrels. He wouldn’t need to juggle weapons. He wouldn’t need to rely on an axe that cracked when overfed. If his arms became the tools, he would always be armed, always ready, and nobody could disarm him without taking the limbs off.

The thought began germinating in his head. With both gauntlets, left and right, he could use them both to fight and defend, and he won’t need any tools to hold and carry, if his own arms become weapons.

He imagined stepping into a fight with empty hands and watching someone’s confidence turn into confusion. That alone was worth a little effort. People respected visible steel. They feared what they didn’t understand.

“But, how will I channel the power between those two?” he thought. After all he had only one [Fire] rune. And he has two arms.

That problem didn’t dissolve just because the plan was cool. The rune was a single heart. Two gauntlets meant two bodies. He needed a way to make one heart feed two limbs without tearing itself apart. Links, circuits, a transfer path. The Tower kept calling it Tongue of Gods, but right now it felt more like wiring.

His mind continued thinking. “Links, I need a way to make the power go from the rune on the left gauntlet to the right gauntlet… but. Wait, I’ll need to make the gauntlet first.”

He turned around to see if he can find any usable metal to forge a new gauntlet. He already had material leftovers from the hatchlings to create the insulating part of the gauntlet so he arm doesn’t simply burn off. Now he needed basic metal.

The room gave him nothing. The table legs were wood. The bed frame was wood. Rotten wood. Even the nails were either missing or so corroded they’d snap under a thumb. The Sun Clan called this “a base,” but it was really just a pile of crumbling walls people slept in because it was easier than sleeping outside.

Suddenly, he remembered something, his inventory.

The Tower didn’t care what the room lacked. It cared what he had killed. The Atrax hadn’t just been enemies. They had been walking material.

He had killed the spiders and they dropped a lot of materials. Including their body parts. Which felt like metal itself. And that was far better than useless steel from a world that was abandoned by the Tower and ruled by the system.

Kael grabbed a few of the materials, a couple spider legs and placed them on the table. With material like hat he could use it as replacement to the steel crowbar he used for his first gauntlet.

The legs clacked softly as they hit the table, heavier than they should have been, each one segmented like an engineered tool.

Their surface had that green-black sheen, a dull metallic luster that looked wrong under sunlight. Kael ran his fingertip along one segment and felt the resistance. Not smooth like polished steel. More like hardened ceramic with a metallic bite.

“Time for an upgrade I suppose.” Kael thought.

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