Back in his room, Kael sat on the edge of his bed with the relic resting on his lap like a wounded animal. Dim lamplight flickered off its scorched plating, casting odd shadows across his desk, his boots, and the wall-sized arcane array that doubled as his "homework board." To the untrained eye, it looked like a discarded piece of student armor that had lost an argument with a forge.
But Kael wasn't untrained.
He held the relic with careful fingers, letting the mana-soaked alloy brush his skin.
It was colder than it should've been.
He tapped the side of the wrist plate. The mana socket didn't even blink. The embedded rune lines, once meant to sync with a user's Core output, were fractured—many of them outright burnt through. The inner chamber where the aether foci should be was empty. One could easily call it useless.
And that was exactly the point.
"God-tier trash," Kael murmured.
[SYSTEM: Relic Integrity = 22% | Reactivity = 0% | Classification: Broken Construct – Grade E]
"You wound me."
[Truth is not an injury.]
He chuckled quietly, then leaned forward and placed the gauntlet onto the worktable.
To anyone else, it was a relic not even worth studying. Not in its current state.
But Kael remembered the pages of the novel. The margins. The side plots that never got their proper arcs. And he remembered the footnote buried halfway through Chapter 219, where the protagonist's rival discovered a "worthless old prototype," only to later rebuild it into a Core-interface amplifier strong enough to override grade limits.
It was a throwaway detail.
Barely five paragraphs.
But Kael had made a habit of noticing the details nobody else did.
He opened a drawer beneath the desk and pulled out a threadbare notebook covered in dense script. His own notes. Carefully compiled from memory, theory fragments, and cross-referenced world events.
He flipped through until he reached a sketched diagram that matched the glove—twin inlets at the knuckles, lattice weave runes along the inside forearm, and a hollow for a foci crystal in the center palm. In the drawing, the gauntlet was paired with two others.
The Corebreaker Triad.
Three items, each designed during the Old Core War to forcibly bypass alignment limitations—intended to turn a Sigilcaster into a Synth-Knight mid-combat, or to let a Netwalker hijack Divine channeling systems.
It was overpowered, illegal, unstable—and absolutely perfect.
The original Kael Vire had never found it. Too obsessed with nobility, with power by force. He had never bothered with trash.
But new Kael?
New Kael collected trash like it owed him rent.
He activated a small sigil above his desk. It projected a pulse of light that outlined the interior components of the glove.
A mess of shattered arrays. Three runes still faintly responsive. The mana distribution circuit entirely dead.
He frowned.
"It shouldn't be this far gone."
[Chrono-scar damage detected: temporal warping present.]
"Time magic?"
[Residual exposure. Trace amounts only. Estimated: 12 years prior.]
Kael's brows furrowed.
That hadn't been in the novel.
So. Someone had tried to use it already—someone with knowledge, and possibly access to unstable time-affecting spells. That narrowed the list of suspects by a lot.
He jotted a quick note beside the sketched diagram.
"Relic compromised—unknown user. Reactivation risk: high. Will require foci override and circuit recasting."
A knock at the door broke the silence.
Kael blinked. He wasn't expecting visitors.
He slipped the gauntlet into the false-bottom drawer, slid his notebook beneath it, and tapped the glyph that reactivated the desk's default projection—randomized class diagrams and fake rune studies.
By the time he opened the door, he wore a perfect expression of mild confusion.
Outside stood one of the academy's delivery servitors—automated, polite, and incapable of judgment. It held a sealed scroll.
"For Kael Vire," it said.
He accepted it, nodded, and closed the door.
The moment it latched, he cracked the seal.
Inside: a letter from Instructor Parxel Volund.
Polite. Brief. But firm.
"Mr. Vire,Following your recent duel and updated mana scan, I request your attendance at a private analysis session this weekend.Please do not attempt to reschedule.—A.I. Parxel Volund"
Kael sighed and leaned his head against the door.
"I bluff one duel, and suddenly the entire faculty thinks I'm about to explode."
[They're not wrong.]
"Wasn't asking you."
That evening, he returned to the relic.
He waited until midnight, activated his room's silence barrier, and placed the gauntlet on a mana-reactive stand. Then, carefully, he sent a single pulse of his Core output into the glove—just enough to see if it would respond.
For two seconds, nothing happened.
Then—just as he started to pull the energy back—the glove twitched.
The plating at the knuckles glowed faintly.
Three fractured runes blinked once, twice—
Then a wave of foreign feedback surged through the connection.
Kael's head snapped back.
The room blurred.
And for a fraction of a second—
—he saw a place that did not exist.
Floating towers. Ribbons of light coded with runes no human mage had ever written. A man in white robes, gauntleted hand raised, eyes pulsing with spiraling threads of every Core Path at once.
The image vanished as fast as it came.
Kael stumbled backward, breath ragged, hand burning.
The glove sat motionless.
[SYSTEM: Unknown vision signature detected. Artifact resonance: Partial.][Fragmented data: "Access Anchor. Thread One. Incomplete."]
"Oh," Kael said slowly. "Oh, that's new."
He sat in silence for several minutes.
The vision hadn't been from the novel. Not as far as he remembered. And that was… alarming.
This wasn't just a relic.
It was a door.
And someone had once tried to open it.
At dawn, Kael packed the glove in reinforced shielding and stored it beneath a sigil lock keyed to his heartbeat.
He scribbled a note in the margin of his notebook:
Next piece: South Catacombs. Archive Sector E. Broken Lattice Spike.
That would be the second relic—the one mistaken for a failed Netwalker interface tool. Dangerous to access. Guarded. But he remembered how.
And this time, he'd be ready.
He glanced out the window of his room, watching the sun rise over Astralis.
The sky burned with amber threads of mana filtering through the outer shields. The tower's silhouette curved upward like the ribs of some vast, dead god.
It was beautiful.
And fake.
Kael smiled faintly.
"Let them chase power through bloodlines and politics. I'll take the scraps."
"Because in the end, I know which ones actually matter."