When Alarion had first entered the challenge dungeon, he’d expected a series of tight corridors, of stone walls and spike traps. It was the sort of dungeon talked about in folk tales and the only one he knew. Valentina’s first challenge had disabused him of that notion. This was her space, and it was clear she could mold it to her whim. If he was to face a test of endurance, it could be anything from crossing an enormous desert to delving into the depths of a deep lake.
Yet somehow she still managed to surprise him. This time, with her simplicity.
The room was a small, bland cube. Perhaps fifteen feet across in either direction, its walls and floor were rough, featureless grey stone, lit by a glowing mote of magic that hovered overhead. There was no exit, save for the entrance he’d used and the room contained only a single object of note. A plush armchair dominated the center of the room, its rich brown leather cracked and worn. With its high back, crystal tipped arm rests and rich construction, it felt more like a throne, the sort of chair a family patriarch might take to when he went to smoke his cigars.
The invitation was clear, at least to him. Whatever challenge Valentina had in mind, it involved the chair. No doubt the test would begin once he sat down. Even so, Alarion thought back to her words, about how he was prone to self-sabotage. A few seconds looking around the room first wouldn’t cost him.
Not that there was much to look at. The walls, floor and ceiling held no great insight when inspected up close. There were no hidden carvings, no secret answers concealed by odd angles or patterns in the wear. It was only when Alarion touched them that the surfaces revealed their true nature.
The sensation was hard to describe. It was cold, but not in temperature. Physically present, but empty, as though with enough of a push, his hand could sink into the wall without breaking it. It was an unpleasant feeling, one that leaked further and further up his arm the longer he remained in contact with the wall.
“What in the world?” Alarion asked as he withdrew his hand. There was no damage, no sign on his palm that anything was amiss, but it took a few seconds for the discomfort to dissipate. Lacking any physical sign of distress, Alarion called up his status. And that was when he saw it.
MP 560/565
The wall was draining his MP.
He reached out and touched the wall again with a grimace. The sensation was still unpleasant, even if he now knew it was not directly harmful. It took a moment, then his MP ticked down. A few seconds later and another point ticked away. The chill proceeded up his arm, and the drain began to come faster. Looking inward with his new [Introverted Mana Sense] Alarion could feel the flow of his internal mana draining out into the otherwise bland stone wall, where it promptly diffused, then vanished in time. Kneeling down, he quickly confirmed with touch that the floor held the same property, likely the roof did as well.
No. Not just touching them, he realized. The drain was small, but his overall rate of regeneration was slower than it should have been. The room itself was soaking up some of his mana by sheer proximity.
Was the chair a decoy? Was the point of the test to somehow charge the room itself?
There was only one way to find out.
The chair conformed to his body as he sat. It was, without a doubt, the most comfortable piece of furniture Alarion had ever sat upon. The wood and leather supported him where he needed it and yielded where he did not. It smelled like oils and time, familiar but distant. It made him think of his father’s embrace. It was an incredible, if entirely mundane chair.
Until he put his hands on the crystal balls that tipped each arm rest.
Cold rushed up his arms and into his chest, a void sensation that dwarfed the discomfort of touching the nearby walls. He tried to hold on to his internal mana, to resist the pull, but it was like grasping at strands of string being pulled at a hundred angles. Even the ones he managed snag were ripped from his grip or torn into pieces by the two opposing forces.
Still pinned at the top of his vision, Alarion watched as his MP cascaded down toward zero. Once it hit, he felt a sharp pang of discomfort as his body began to convert his remaining resource pools into MP at a precipitous rate.
“Stop. Stop!” Alarion shouted at no one as he struggled to remove his hands. They were drawn to the crystal orbs by some unseen force and it took a considerable effort and a twist of his body for leverage to pry one free. Luckily, doing so instantly broke the connection and the siphon stopped as quickly as it had begun.
His MP was at zero while his HP and Stamina were barely above two-thirds. It had been less than thirty seconds.
Twenty-three, if he had to guess, based on the clock that had appeared above the door.
59:37
An hour. He’d have to endure an hour of that. Was Valentina insane?
“Are you insane?” Alarion asked as he re-emerged from the challenge room to find Valentina curled in an armchair of her own, legs thrown over the edge with a book in hand.
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“Hmm? Giving up already?”
“What? No. I-” He could see a glimmer of amusement in her eye, and he did not like it in the slightest. “That chair could have killed me.”
“Pshaw, no. You just would have failed. That would have been unfortunate, but far from lethal.”
Alarion opened his mouth to protest before he realized she was right. Only the hardest rooms had the potential to be lethal. Even if it felt dangerous, there was no way she’d have let him die.
“Anything else? Time is ticking.”
“An hour?” He asked, grimly.
“Well, the time does slowly go back up when you’re not in the chair, so depending on how many breaks you take, it could be considerably longer.”
Alarion glared.
“You already got a free lesson on your last test. I’m here to challenge you, not baby you. You have all the skills you need to complete this challenge. Get to it.”
She didn’t dismiss him in so many words, but the way Valentina looked back to her book left Alarion with no illusions that she was interested in continuing the conversation. With a sigh, he returned to the challenge room.
The conundrum in front of him was obvious. It took nearly two hours for his MP to regenerate all the way to its maximum, which earned him about twenty seconds of time off the challenge clock. The math there did not work in his favor. It would take the better part of two weeks for him to chip away at that timer, and that was without it ticking back up during his rest periods.
It also assumed that he safely broke the connection each time and didn’t somehow cause lasting damage. With his new condition, that was nowhere near a certainty.
> New Condition! Overspent – Moderate
> [Survivor’s Endurance] has taken effect.
> [Overspent – Moderate] – Convert remaining resource pools to MP at a rate of 1:3.
The basic description was less helpful than normal, which forced Alarion deeper into his menus for a full description:
> Overspent
>
> Cause: The Overspent condition occurs when a forced or intentional drain would reduce an existing resource pool (MP/Stamina) below 0.
>
> Effects: The remaining resource pools are forcibly converted at a rate of 1:2 and immediately spent through the drain effect as though they were the existing resource. E.g. a stamina drain would result in 1 HP and 1 MP being converted into 1 stamina which is then drained. For every 25% drained over the pool maximum, the severity of this condition increases. E.g. at -25/100 stamina (25 MP/HP spent) the severity of the condition will increase, as will the conversion rate.
The condition was one more wrinkle in an already difficult situation. Like most conditions, [Overspent] would take hours to heal, with the duration ramping up alongside the severity. At moderate, the System told him it would take slightly over eight hours to heal fully. Testing the chair again too quickly risked compounding the issue, and if it got too severe he stood a real chance of failure.
That meant he had eight hours to puzzle out a solution. To figure out the trick behind the challenge. If there was one.
It was the room itself, of that he was almost certain. The slow drain mimicked that of the now frightening chair, but on a scale where Alarion would be able to study the effect and come up with some sort of countermeasure.
He waited several long minutes for his MP to recharge to a reasonable level, then settled down cross legged, careful to avoid touching bare skin to the floor. Once he was comfortable, Alarion reached out a hand and touched it to the nearest wall. He almost jerked away at the now familiar and disconcerting chill but kept his touch in place as he focused on the wall, studying the effects of the mana absorbing material through his [Introverted Mana Sense].
The tug from the wall was barely a fraction of the wrenching pull that the chair had exerted upon him. It was slow enough that Alarion could follow the strands of individual mana as they were pulled from his core. But even weak as it was, he was no more effective at stopping it than he had been with the chair. With an effort of will, Alarion found he could stop a thread here or there, but only for a moment. Inevitably, the strands subjected to that tug of war would snap under the pressure, leaving him with little to show for his effort.
During his wait, Alarion had considered a number of possible theories about how the wall functioned, but as it drained his mana, second by second, he was able to put a number of those quite quickly to bed. It was not simply an unbound field, greedily soaking up whatever mana it was given, because the mana didn’t remain. It didn’t flow to some other part of the room, or power some yet unseen facet of another spell. Instead his mana was drained, segmented and obliterated.
The process looked familiar. It took nearly an hour of on and off study for him to be certain, but his gut instinct proved correct. That was void magic.
It helped explain why the chair posed such a threat to him. Alarion’s condition made him especially susceptible to MP draining attacks, and Void magic was second to only the Gravity affinity in that regard. While the latter forcibly ‘pulled’ the mana from its target, Void spells created an absence that magical energy naturally wanted to fill.
Sadly, knowledge of how the trap functioned was not particularly useful in disarming it. The void magic within the walls, and presumably within the chair, had no ready access for disruption. There were no sigils or markings he could disrupt or distort, and he was nowhere near talented enough to try to counter the magic with a spell of his own.
Nor was that the point of the challenge, he knew. This was an endurance challenge, not an arcane one. The goal was not to come up with a clever solution to subvert the trap, but to show that he could survive it. True, he’d probably get full marks if he found a way to circumvent it, but having met its designer, Alarion didn’t think he was likely to outsmart her. Not that he was likely to survive the trap either.
He needed a way to resist the pull. Were he a functional person, he’d have mana gates that he could bolster to stop the worst of it. But then if he were functional Valentina would have given him a different challenge entirely. Probably barraged him with overbearing magical pressure, the sort of thing Alarion could take in stride. Unlike this, which…
He was thinking in circles. Useless ones, at that.
“Hmm…” Alarion grumbled as he stood and began to pace the room’s outer edge. If he were going to think in circles, he might as well walk in them.
His mana was too fragile. That was the heart of the issue. ZEKE had taught him how to mold and grasp his mana as part of his training on [Quicken] and [Mend Body], but even if he had a good grip on it before he sat down, the sheer strength of the pull would rend the individual strands of his mana asunder in instants.
Alarion walked a circle, then stopped.
Unless.