Chapter 88: Prototype

After what felt like an hour, time that stretched the way it always did when you were forcing your brain to do something it had never done before, Kael leaned back and let out a slow breath through his nose.

Working with what little leather he had left, he managed to create a glove.

It was ugly. There was no polite way around that. It looked like something a desperate man would stitch together in the dark while cursing at every step, patchwork layered on patchwork, seams pulled too tight in some places and too loose in others, the shape slightly off so that the fingers sat a fraction too long. But it was a glove nonetheless, and the important part was that it held together.

Brokk’s hammer had done what it always did, turned “barely functional” into “surprisingly solid.” Every bit and piece that comprised the glove had been neatly sealed together as he tapped and pressed and hammered, the leather edges shrinking into one another until the seams stopped looking like wounds and started looking like design.

Not pretty design. More like… industrial survival design. The kind that didn’t care about aesthetics because aesthetics didn’t keep you alive.

Still, the system didn’t seem generous enough to give him a notification for having created an “item.”

Kael waited a moment anyway, half expecting the blue text to flicker into existence, and when nothing happened, he clicked his tongue and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Seems like I need two of it to make an item,” he sighed, and the annoyance in his voice was tired rather than angry. He had a feel for the system’s patterns now. If it didn’t label it, it didn’t respect it. And if it didn’t respect it, it probably wouldn’t interact cleanly with the rune.

He stared at the glove in his lap for a beat, then at the fire rune still embedded in the crowbar-staff on the floor.

’Alright. No shortcuts,’ he told himself, and it came with a faint, bitter humor. This whole place was literally built on shortcuts that killed you.

He pried the rune off the staff, careful, cautious, half expecting it to punish him again for touching it, his fingers tense, his breath held like he was defusing a bomb.

The rune came free.

And the notification still showed.

[Would you like to use [Fire] Rune]

Kael swallowed. The memory of his hand going up in flames was still too fresh, still sharp enough that his body reacted before his mind could. A faint tightening in his shoulders. A subtle recoil in his wrist. His nerves remembered pain like it was a language.

He took a deep breath anyway, forced the air in, forced the tremor down. If he didn’t test this properly, then all he had was fear. And fear was expensive too.

The first thing he did was practical.

He tucked the sleeves of his jacket inside the glove.

He made sure the leather overlapped, layered it until there was as little open skin as possible. No gaps for flame to slip through. No “oops” moment where the rune backfired and fire crawled up his sleeve like it had rights.

Then he pulled out the poison water bottle he’d been “gifted” by Peter and twisted the cap open.

The smell that came out was faint, chemically wrong, like metal and bitterness. He didn’t drink it, obviously, but he set it within reach anyway.

Even if it was poison, water was water. It could still douse fire.

“Okay,” Kael muttered, voice low and flat like he was talking himself through a risky weld on a construction site. “Here goes nothing.”

He pointed the rune outward, squinted his eyes, and made sure he was as far away from his own body as he could reasonably manage. The glove made his grip clumsy. It didn’t feel like his hand anymore. It felt like a tool holding another tool.

Then he channeled his mana into it.

The rune turned red.

The heat ramped up immediately, but this time it didn’t sink into his skin like a hook. It pressed against the glove, aggressive but contained, like a fire trapped behind glass. A second later, the rune spat out a fireball, the size of a grown man’s head, shooting forward and slamming into the wall.

It dispersed into nothing soon after, leaving a darkened scorch and a brief hiss as grime cooked.

There was still no real push, no impact force. Just heat, delivered with blunt cruelty.

But the glove held.

It held well. Too well, actually.

Kael stared at his hand for a second, like he expected it to suddenly be ruined anyway. Like pain would arrive late, like a bill.

When it didn’t, he exhaled so hard it almost sounded like laughter.

“Ah, thank god,” he said, and his shoulders dropped a fraction. “This is usable…”

Still… something felt wrong.

Not the heat. Not the safety. The efficiency.

It was too inefficient. He could feel it in the way his mana drained, in the way the rune responded like a wild animal that didn’t want to be handled. The glove warded the heat away, sure, but it was awkward holding the rune like that. It wasn’t stable. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t something he could rely on in a fight where one mistake would get his throat opened.

His eyes flicked down to the crowbar on the ground.

“If I were to coat my hand with that,” he murmured, thinking out loud now, mind racing ahead like it always did when he got a problem he could build his way out of. “A leather-padded steel glove… with a metallic grip at the palm to hold the rune in place…”

He paused, seeing it in his head like a blueprint. The rune nestled in a fitted bracket. Leather layered beneath. A handle that kept it close, stable, and safe. A way to use the rune like a weapon instead of a self-harm ritual.

The thought germinated. No, it grew to an idea. And he had the materials to create it.

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