Chapter 127: [Atrax Composite Thermalloy]

But he wasn’t going to create a new gauntlet without upgrading his older one. And he also couldn’t simply start dismantling the gauntlet on him right now, since he’ll need its heat to melt the new material.

He needed a forge, but he didn’t have one. He needed heat without losing a hand. He needed control, not brute fire. He glanced at the gauntlet, then at the runes seated along it. Anchor. Fire. Heft. One of these could give him control if he used it right.

Kael pulled a few of the remaining black basilisk scales he had and turned them to powder using Brokk’s hammer.

The hammer taps were quiet but satisfying, each scale cracking with a dry pop, then crumbling into fine dark dust. The powder clung to his fingers like soot, and he brushed it into a small pile. Basilisk scale powder had already proven its worth. Mixed into metal, it changed behavior. Heat resistance. Conductivity. Stability. It wasn’t magic by itself, but it was the kind of material the Tower loved when you used it intelligently.

Then he removed the Heft rune, leaving the Anchor and Fire runes alone on the gauntlet.

Heft was power, sure, but it was also stupidity. It made everything heavier, including mistakes. Kael needed precision right now, not a cannon aimed at his own face.

“Let’s try Excise first.” He didn’t want to start crafting materials before he tried the new rune, and once he placed it.

He seated the rune carefully, listening for that faint click of fit, the way a piece of a mechanism settled into its slot. The moment it locked, the gauntlet felt subtly different, like tension moved along its frame.

[High Synergies detected.]

[Anchor+ Excise+ Fire] 98%

Kael’s eyes narrowed. Ninety-eight percent. That wasn’t just good. That was the Tower practically nodding.

’This is even higher than using Heft. I suppose making fire heavy makes the synergy drops since it’s not a natural thing for flames.’

He rolled his shoulder once, set his stance, and aimed at the floor where he’d placed the spider legs. He wasn’t about to blast a wall and draw attention. Quiet mattered here. The lock he repaired would keep people out, but sound traveled through empty hallways like gossip.

Kael aimed with his gauntlet and let a tiny bit of his mana through.

The blue Internal Energy bar dipped so slightly it was almost insulting, and the sensation was clean. No skull-splitting pain, no nausea, just a pull from somewhere deep that made his arm feel lighter for a breath.

The flame that came out was unlike before. Unlike the fireball that came out, this time, with the use of [Excise,] which cut away the unnecessary parts of the flame, something new happened.

Instead of a burst, a sphere, an impact that disappointed him, the output stretched.

Instead of a sudden burst of fire that turned to a fireball that flew, it had no impact on the wall. This time, the fire turned into a blowtorch. A long stream of fire that was constant, powerful, and silent.

Silence was an important part. The fire didn’t roar. It hissed, a controlled, steady stream that looked almost calm until it touched something. It was heat without theatrics. Heat as a tool.

It still didn’t have weight, so when he aimed it at the spider parts, it began melting them without blowing everything everywhere.

The spider’s legs didn’t explode. They softened, then sagged, then began to drip like wax, the green-black surface turning dull as it liquefied. The smell was sharp, metallic, with a faint bitter tang that made Kael breathe through his mouth. The basilisk powder darkened as the heat touched it, and tiny sparks jumped where impurities reacted.

Kael continued focusing the flames on the parts until all turned to molten metal. The powder and the spider shell fused together. It looked like a large blob of hot molten lava on the ground.

The blob glowed angry orange at the center and darker at the edges, and it pulsed as if alive. The basilisk powder swirled through it like ink in water, not mixing completely, creating veins and streaks that hinted at different properties. Kael shifted the blowtorch slightly, controlling where it stayed hottest, where it cooled, trying to avoid uneven brittleness.

Thankfully, there was no noise and no echo of his work, so no one came investigating.

Kael then pulled Brokk’s hammer and began hammering the molten material, turning it into a block of metal.

Each tap made the blob tighten, square off, become less like a puddle and more like a bar. The hammer didn’t just shape it. It persuaded it. It forced the material to accept being a tool.

***

[Atrax Composite Thermalloy]

A highly abrasive, heat-resistant composite alloy.

Exhibits exceptional hardness and cutting potential.

Warning: Structural integrity is extremely poor.

Best suited for disposable or single-impact weapons.

Attempting to forge defensive equipment from this material would yield results inferior to tempered glass.

***

“Ah, that’s disappointing.” Kael thought as he saw the tooltip.

He stared at the warning like it was a personal insult. He’d just turned spider legs into metal with a controlled flame stream and a legendary hammer, and the Tower still had the nerve to call it inferior to tempered glass for defense.

The idea was there, he created the metal bar he wanted, but this was basically telling him it’s better used for making throwing weapons than armor, as it will simply break on contact.

Kael turned the bar slightly, watching the surface. It looked promising. Too promising. Which meant the problem wasn’t visible. It was inside. Microfractures. High-carbon brittleness. The same issue that made spider shells crack when hit hard enough.

“Too much carbon, no wonder the spiders broke when I punched them hard enough…” Kael thought for a bit on how to reduce the carbon in the bar.

He was a mechanical engineer before, so he understood metal better than most common people.

And to reduce the carbon to make this weapon less brittle, he had two choices.

The first one, to temper it more, extract as much carbon by heat treating this material, in a forge. Using a lot of effort, hammering and hard work. That will need heating it to a critical point, quenching it, and then tempering it at lower heat.

Kael could practically feel the process in his hands. Heat, quench, temper. It shaped what existed. It didn’t magically change a brittle alloy into ductile steel if the underlying composition stayed wrong.

The second was… Dilution.

“That I can do,” Kael looked at the rest of his materials. And noticed the Spider Silk.

It was named Spider Silk, but this thing was tougher than steel, and Kael experienced it first hand.

The fact he used this very material to slid down the building without it breaking or snapping.

It wasn’t tough, but it was very malleable and firm.

Kael pulled out the silk and placed it on top of the bar, just a few strands at first, then began hammering it into the bar.

Unlike before, where he would melt materials, this time he felt that fusing this with the bar would serve a different purpose.

He wasn’t trying to make the silk disappear. He wanted it to remain. He wanted it to become a skeleton inside the metal, a lattice that would catch fractures before they spread, the same way rebar kept concrete from turning into dust.

Kael continued hammering more and more of the silk and noticed that the bar grew bigger, but also changed color and structure.

It became smoother, grayer, and also had a texture to it now. Barely noticeable but there nevertheless.

Once he placed his finger on the bar, he felt it, small rigids, no more like small bumps. Smooth bumps, aligned and structured together. Like a mesh.

[Congratulations! You have created a new material never before seen in the Tower!]+1 INT

The message surprised even Kael.

He stopped mid-motion, hammer hovering, staring at the bar like it might have started talking. The Tower didn’t hand out praise easily. If it was calling it “new,” that meant nobody had tried this exact combination before, or nobody had survived long enough to make it work.

[New Material Discovered.Atrax Fibersteel.Classification: Fiber-Reinforced Thermalloy.Originally born as a brittle, high-carbon thermalloy, its structural weakness was overcome through filament integration. The embedded silk fibers form a tension lattice within the alloy, preventing fracture propagation and distributing impact stress across its metallic grain.

Exhibits high heat resistance, exceptional surface hardness, and improved shock tolerance.

While unsuitable for heavy armor plating, it excels in modular weapon systems and impact-driven constructs.

A material born not from brute forging, but from understanding.]

“Damn… I did not expect it to be this good,” Kael was surprised by his own creation at this point.

He dragged his thumb along the surface again, feeling the subtle mesh texture, and smiled without meaning to. This was the kind of thing that made his old engineer brain feel alive again. Not a random loot drop. Not a lucky title. A result that came from actually thinking.

He looked at the bar, however, and realized a sad fact. It can only create one gauntlet. He needed two.

And even if he used his own gauntlet as material, to compare the two materials was like comparing the sun and the moon. One was made from lesser metal, while the other had Tower Metal.

The difference would be huge.

“It’s time I give up on the old gauntlet…” Kael though.

He had material leftovers to make another Atrax Fibersteel. And he even had a far superior metal than the one he used to create the gauntlet with.

He looked at the Fire-imbued axe.

A wide grin crept up his face.

’What if I add the axe part to this metal… what would come out of it?’

Kael rotated the axe in his hand.

The metal was different. He could feel it now that he had something better to compare it to. Denser. Cleaner. There was something in it that did not belong to the mundane world.

Tower Metal.

He brought the axe closer to the Atrax Fibersteel bar and hesitated for only a second.

“If I’m replacing the old gauntlet… I might as well replace it properly.”

He placed the axe head against the bar and ignited the controlled flame once more from his gauntlet.

This time, the reaction was immediate.

The green-gray alloy did not simply melt.

It reacted.

The silk-lattice within the Fibersteel began glowing faintly, threads lighting up like veins beneath skin. The moment the molten Tower Metal touched it, the entire bar shuddered.

Kael’s grin widened.

“Oh… you’re compatible.”

The flame intensified.

Instead of cracking under the higher heat, the Fibersteel absorbed it. The embedded silk structure did not burn it stabilized the expansion. The molten metals began folding into each other, not mixing chaotically but interlocking, layer by layer.

Not dilution.

Integration.

The color shifted.

Green faded.

Gray deepened.

A faint crimson shimmer pulsed beneath the surface like restrained embers.

When Kael finally pulled the flame away, what remained was no longer a simple reinforced alloy.

It hummed.

Then the system hits him with:

[Material Evolution Detected.][Atrax Pyrefiber Alloy]A hybrid composite formed through the integration of Atrax Fibersteel and Fire-aspected Metal.The internal filament lattice now conducts and stabilizes thermal energy rather than resisting it.High Heat Tolerance.Thermal Channeling.Reduced Structural Fracture Risk under Extreme Temperature Variance.

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