Chapter 171: Testing and More Testing!

’Even the lingering effect is shorter. But this doesn’t feel like it’s effective,” he sighed.

It looked impressive, sure, but if the wall kept “healing” behind the blade, then what was the point? A flashy light show that drained him slowly was still a waste if it didn’t change anything.

There was a metal office chair in the room.

Looking at it, then at his ’energy’ blade, Kael thought to try something.

He sliced through the chair’s hand rest, expecting nothing to happen.

But then, suddenly, the armrest fell down.

The small bit that was ’removed’ by the energy blade returned to how it was, but the arm was completely severed.

Kael froze, then slowly leaned closer like he didn’t trust his eyes.

The chair didn’t explode. It didn’t melt. It didn’t burn. The severed piece had simply dropped, and gravity had done the rest, as if this were normal.

“It doesn’t cut,” Kael muttered as he held the armrest. The ’cut’ looked clean, far too clean for even the sharpest blade.

Even though the armrest was grainy.

It was still smooth when ’cut’.

His thumb ran along the edge. No burr. No tear. No jagged fracture. It looked like the material had been separated with impossible precision, but there were no signs of slicing pressure.

This confused Kael.

He was sure that the blade didn’t cut, nor sever.

“It disconnects…” He muttered.

That was the shape of it. Darkness wasn’t acting like a sword. It wasn’t removing material by force. It was making the connection meaningless for a fraction of time, deleting the “together” part of reality. The piece didn’t need to be destroyed to be separated. It only needed one moment where it was no longer attached to anything.

“This is pretty fucking cracked…”

The snark came out before he could stop it, half awe, half the kind of humor you used to keep yourself from thinking too long about void-blades and disappearing walls.

He looked at the wall and thought.

“What if I use heft too? Would the blade have weight? Can darkness have weight?”

The thought was absurd, physically and scientifically absurd.

How can non-matter have ’weight’.

But then again, fire, which is pure energy, was given weight.

He’d already done one impossible thing. The Tower had already let him cheat a law of physics by brute-forcing meaning into a rune. So the question wasn’t “is it logical?” The question was “Is it consistent with the Tower’s nonsense?”

“But excise and Heft don’t like each other,” he thought. “Then again, I did place them right next to each other that time… and I know for a fact that the order of runes plays a crucial role in how they function…”

That was the key. Heft and Excise fought when they were forced to share the same immediate pathway. But order and distance mattered. Conductivity mattered. He’d seen that with the chain and the sockets. He’d learned it the hard way: runes weren’t just effects. They were a circuit.

He sat on the old chair without armrests and placed a finger on the dusty table, writing.

“Anchor=> Darkness=> Excise=> Heft…”

He stared at the line, then wiped it away with the side of his palm as the sequence offended him.

“This won’t work, Excise then heft immediately breaks the link… it happened before. But if darkness is the ’projector’ rune. I’m already limited by how I can use the others.

His brain ran ahead of his hand, drawing pathways, blocking routes, rerouting energy like he was back in a classroom diagramming mechanical systems, except now the “parts” were ancient stones and the consequences were death.

Kael thought more as he drew on the dust.

He couldn’t get the Darkness rune to benefit from both Heft and Excise at the same time without the whole structure failing.

“I need a way to get Heft to interact with darkness alone without being affected by Excise. And I need Excise to affect Darkness alone without being challenged by Heft.”

He raised his head up, looking at the ceiling, as if the answer would be written there.

“Runes aren’t about how to combine them, it’s where you place them. Darkness is an output rune, while the others are support types… how can I apply both supports without the whole thing collapsing…”

He thought about having both Excise and Heft on the same level.

“Anchor=> Excise + Heft => Darkness…”

Would that work?

The only honest way to find out was to test it and see what the Tower yelled at him for.

He pulled out Brokk’s hammer and hammered another slot for the Excise rune right next to Heft, then placed the rune there.

He couldn’t even do much before a notification appeared informing him of the changes.

**

[High contradictive asymmetry detected!]

[High connectivity and proximity of the runes [Heft + Excise] is causing instability!]

[Synergy heavily dropped! 19% synergy detected.]

**

“Damn, this won’t work,” he sighed as he removed the Excise rune.

But he didn’t feel frustrated for long.

“But, this is good,” Kael thought as he realized the issue.

Connectivity.

The two runes that were close to each other were ’connected’ to each other by the metal of the gauntlet; there was no separator between them, so they fought for energy.

“This isn’t simply about position anymore, even conduction is a problem.”

He said as he looked at the empty left gauntlet.

The left gauntlet wasn’t just “empty.” It was unused real estate. A separate circuit. A separate lane.

“Hmm, what if…”

He moved fast, like his hands already knew what his mind wanted.

He hammered the Excise Rune on the forearm and then pulled out the chain from the left-hand gauntlet to hammer it at the palm, directly in contact with the empty socket where he wanted to place the Darkness rune.

He was building distance on purpose, making Heft and Anchor stay on the right, keeping Excise away from Heft’s immediate proximity, then bridging only what needed to bridge through the chain. A crude solution, but Kael had been living off crude solutions.

“This way, Anchor and Heft will remain on the left side, allowing me to use the Fire rune as normal,” but Heft and Anchor will be connected by the chain directly to the darkness rune.

And Excise will be behind the darkness rune not attached directly to the heft rune on the right gauntlet.

The theory was messy, but it had a clean goal: stop the runes from yelling at each other long enough to produce something usable.

[Synergy increased significantly!]

78% synergy detected.

Contradictive asymmetry has been reduced.

The instability of [Heft] and [Excise] has been reduced due to the distance between the two runes.

There are still connectivity issues with the material itself.

Synergy cannot reach optimal levels.

***

“Wow, this is good. This means it can work now… I hope.”

The last part was honest. The Tower didn’t care about optimism. It cared about results.

He pointed his left palm up, with the darkness rune pointing at the wall, and let some of the energy go through his right arm.

He felt it happen in layers: Anchor smoothing the flow, Heft thickening it, the chain tugging like a conduit as power crossed over, then the Darkness rune taking that reshaped energy and translating it into something that didn’t belong in a normal world.

The two ’lanes’ of energy, one with anchor and heft funneled through the chains, then met with [Excise] at the darkness rune.

There was a small jitter of energy.

Just a stutter, like the system itself hesitated to approve what he was doing.

But the release was still incredible.

A bolt of darkness shot out from his palm.

Quite larger than a fireball, almost the size of a bowling ball.

It struck the nearest wall and then splattered like a paint-filled balloon.

Suddenly, the entire section of the wall that had ’darkness’ painted on it simply disappeared from existence.

Allowing Kael to see beyond the wall into another room.

Kael’s breath caught, not from fear, though that was there too, but from the sheer wrongness of it. The wall didn’t crumble. It didn’t crack. It simply wasn’t there, like a chunk of reality had been scooped out with a ladle.

The energy cost of such an effect was surprisingly… marginal.

“Five percent… that only costs five percent?” Kael thought as he saw the wall returning to reality immediately after.

The missing section snapped back as if it had never left, seamless and perfect, as if the world were correcting itself after a brief insult. Kael stared at his internal energy bar again to confirm he hadn’t imagined the cost, then looked back at the wall like he expected it to complain.

“This… could be very usable…” he smiled.

Not a wide grin. Not celebration.

A thin, dangerous smile, the kind you get when you find a weapon you shouldn’t have and realize you might actually live long enough to use it.

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