Chapter 167: Coded Matrix

He could feel that limitation. Internal energy wasn’t mana; you didn’t get a screaming migraine warning you to stop.

It just failed quietly, and quiet failure in the Tower meant waking up on the floor with something chewing your face.

He wasn’t spending what he couldn’t afford.

And another thing also became pretty apparent.

“Too many runes…” He muttered.

It wasn’t the kind of problem normal climbers complained about, but Kael didn’t care. More options meant more complexity, and complexity meant mistakes when you were under pressure.

His gauntlets had only so many slots, and synergy wasn’t forgiving. Stack the wrong runes together, and the system didn’t just scold you; it punished you with wasted output, volatility, or dead tools.

It wasn’t a bad thing, but it wasn’t a good thing either. He had limited spots to put the runes in his arms, and once he socketed too many, the synergy would drop immediately.

He pictured it in his head like a circuit board. Too many components, not enough clean pathways, and suddenly everything heated up and melted. The Tower didn’t hand out manuals. It handed out consequences.

For now, it wasn’t a great concern, but it’ll soon be, once he needs to swap runes on the fly.

“I don’t have enough spots in my arms for that…” he sighed as he looked at his ’arms.’

The gauntlets weren’t just gear anymore, they were infrastructure. He flexed his wrists and felt the weight, felt the chain’s slight tug, felt how much his fighting style had already shifted toward using his hands like weapons. The problem was that “infrastructure” didn’t adapt quickly. Not without planning.

He didn’t have enough space along his ’arms’ to fix that problem.

A small thought came to mind when he was thinking that.

“Arms… arms…”He paused.”Arm…Gun…

A second pause

“…revolver?”

It landed in his mind with that stupid, brilliant clarity that only showed up when you were exhausted enough to stop overthinking.

A revolver didn’t hold one bullet. It held a cylinder. Rotate it, choose the chamber, fire what you needed. Simple. Reliable. Brutally practical.

He was struck by lightning, or felt like he was struck by lightning, as he found an incredibly absurd way to fix the issue he was having.

“Rotating rune chambers…” he placed a palm on his left arm. And then slid the palm forward.

The idea unfurled fast: a cylinder built into the gauntlet’s forearm, holding runes in a ring. Rotate the chamber to align the runes you wanted into the conductive pathway, while isolating the ones that didn’t play nice, like keeping Heft and Excise from stepping on each other’s toes by physically breaking the “link” when they weren’t selected. It was mechanical. It was modular. It was his kind of solution.

The thought kept growing inside Kael’s head.

He could see the whole system in pieces: separators to prevent passive bleed, lock positions to avoid accidental alignment, even a crude indexing notch so he could feel which rune was active without looking. Then it got more ambitious, multiple cylinders, different combinations, maybe even a way to “route” runic words without him needing to consciously shape them.

But he immediately shook his head.

“That won’t work, not here, not now. Not enough time, and no materials.” He sighed as he rested on a broken chair.

It was a good idea. Which meant it belonged in a world where he had a workshop, spare parts, and time that wasn’t being eaten by a fiery death circle. Here, rushing a mechanism like that would mean one jam, one misalignment, one failure mid-fight, and he’d die with a clever design in his hands.

To create something that sophisticated would require an immense amount of planning and time. That can’t be achieved in one or two days, and will need a great deal of mental effort to come up with a functional gauntlet that can swap runes on the fly.

For now, he doesn’t need that; he doesn’t even have a lot of runes to apply something like that yet.

“Let’s just upgrade our current gear,” Kael said as he looked down at his tracksuit. Former tracksuit.

The thing barely qualified as clothing now. It was scorched, torn, hanging in pathetic strips that did more to announce “I’ve been through fire” than hide anything. Beneath it, the basilisk leather caught the light differently, darker, sturdier, too clean for a first-floor climber. The disguise was failing on sheer condition alone.

He tugged at the fabric and it crumbled slightly, ash flaking onto his fingers. He could smell his own hair still, burnt, sharp, humiliating. It wasn’t just comfort. It was visibility. Anyone who saw him up close would know he’d been near the Ifrit’s zone.

The leather pants were made of a far inferior material than the jacket. So he needed to upgrade them first.

“And I need a mask, or a helmet.” Kael thought.

He touched his brow and hissed slightly at the tenderness. The fire dive had forced him to shield his face with his gauntlets, but heat still found gaps. He could feel where blisters wanted to rise, where skin had been kissed too hard by that furnace air. One more close call like that and his eyes would be the first thing to go, new awakening or not.

Even one of his brows was slightly charred.

Not to mention He stank of burnt hair smell.

“Let’s get this done with then,” Kael muttered as he began working on the armor.

He set his materials out, rolled his shoulders once like he could shake exhaustion off, and let the old rhythm return: measure, cut, hammer, adapt. Whatever the Tower was trying to do to him, he wasn’t going to sit around waiting for it to finish the job.

Placing the materials first on the table, he began planning. The first to build was the mask. And if he had anything leftover, then he could either reinforce the pants or recreate them anew.

For a brief second, Kael felt far more at ease than ever before. After all, it is only when one begins using their own hands does he feel like they are the master of their own creation and master of their own fate.

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