[Voidknight Ascension] Chapter 47: The Price of Failure

Long leafy vines unfurled from the ceiling, bearing round blue fruits that began to shine brighter than even the [Archflame Coal].

As hungry as Sam was, he didn’t have any time to inspect them as he hunted for a switch, a lever, something to help the people trapped mere inches away from freedom.

Komachi did though. Yowling, she leapt onto one of the mini-melons and dug in with her claws.

“Mana, it recovers mana!” The cat said between the noisy munching.

While there were several doors with strange concentric engravings, there was little else. No handles, nothing resembling a lever or a puzzle to solve by arranging weird pictures of animals in the correct order.

Definitely no keys either, not even an errant pot to smash to possibly find one within.

He prepared his greatsword, searching for a weak point in one of the doors. It worked back in the Dark Vault. Why wouldn’t it work here?

And then he saw the flaw in the logic.

While Breaking would work, it might unleash a level of destruction that was akin to an explosion. He might kill the very people he was trying to save.

Constraining his mana use with [Void: Scour] was difficult enough, and limiting the destructive force with Breaking was next to impossible with his current skill and stats.

There were people behind those doors, people who would either be severely injured or outright killed by using his bloodline to wreck his way through.

Raiko pressed her hand to a central spot on one of the doors, straining.

“Can’t you get through?” Sam asked.

She shook her head. “It’s draining my mana, just touching it. The door’s mechanism is interfering with my spirit form. And the stone around is warded in some way.”

“So it needs mana to open?” Sam guessed.

Without further debate, Sam let go of his sword and pressed his hand to the door in front of him. He urged mana through his body to flow up his arm and seep out through his hand into the door.

Some of the lines in the door glowed blue, like a child tracing the path through a maze. As soon as Sam stepped back, the mana began to recede.

Once he got the trick of it, he flooded the door in front of him with mana. Every moment counted.

The process drained his MP fast.

As thin geometric lines of mana raced their way across the surface of the door, Sam could tell that even his newly enhanced MP wasn’t going to cut it.

The best he could estimate was that he would need at least 100 mana to open a single door. “Raiko, I need some mana over here. I don’t have enough.”

Pressing her hands to the door, Raiko shook her head. “I can’t join my mana to yours.”

Sam cursed and, as his vision swam from emptying his body of mana, he staggered back and tried hard to think. Not an easy feat when you have a blood sugar crash on steroids hampering your thoughts.

Fruit after fruit fell from the ceiling. With his MP bottomed out, darkening his vision and making his head spin, Sam grabbed one and scarfed it down.

[Ember Vine Fruit]

(Food Item) (F-Class)

(★Common)

When eaten, recovers your MP by increasing your natural MP regeneration rate in inverse proportion to how much MP you have left. Refining this fruit amplifies its natural restorative properties.

Of course! I could bottom out my MP, eat this fruit, and then continue.

Sam started to feel better immediately, pressing his hand against the door again as his mana quickly regenerated, since it was at literally 0 when he ate the fruit.

The door drained away the mana just as fast as he could recover it, and by the time the door began to grind open slowly, Sam was once again woozy and lightheaded.

Worse, the effect of the fruit had fallen off, putting him at a measly 7MP.

Sam reached for another fruit and popped it into his mouth as the door continued its ponderously slow opening sequence.

A man staggered out of the opening and collapsed at Sam’s feet. He  looked even worse than Sam felt. Blood stained his tattered clothing. His armor looked like it had lost a fight with a can opener, and one of his eyes was crusted shut with blood.

Even more surprising was that Sam recognized him.

Out of all the people Sam might have expected to see, Kai was pretty far down the list.

“Komachi, help him!” Sam shouted, kneeling beside the large Hawaiian man and trying his best to apply basic first aid.

Despite eating another fruit, he couldn’t seem to recover anymore mana. Worse, he could still hear the frantic pounding of several other people still trapped.

If I can’t save any of the others, at least don’t let Kai die, Sam snarled to himself. You took first aid, find the bleeding and apply pressure, keep the head level, make sure he’s still breathing and find a fucking pulse, Sam.

Komachi dropped from the ceiling and cast [Regen] upon Kai multiple times in quick succession. Musical notes burst into being all around his prone form as the stacks of [Regen] built higher and higher.

While one instance of [Regen] was quite weak, layering so many stacks of HP restoration dramatically increased the effect and then continuously applied it without letting up.

Blood seeped and oozed out between Sam’s fingers. Kai had a large gash on his thigh. Only his higher stats must have saved him from death, because any standard human with a wound that bad would have been dead a long time ago.

As Komachi’s [Regen] stacks went to work, the bleeding slowed and then stopped altogether.

The wound was still there, but it was on the mend. He wouldn’t be moving about anytime soon, but he wouldn’t die. Or so Sam hoped.

But that left him with a different problem.

What to do about the other doors?

“Keep an eye on him, Komachi,” Sam said, staggering up to one of the locked doors. He placed the bloody hand against it, leaving a crimson hand print when he quickly took it away before the last dregs of his mana were siphoned out by the door.

He could hardly see the thin mana traceries across the door.

Think, Sam, think. He took a deep breath and inadvertently pulled on the Heat of the [Archflame Coal] still gripped in his fist.

Immediately, he felt better. His head cleared.

A glance at his MP showed him that there was no difference there, but the Archflame was different, wasn’t it? He could borrow its power. And even after the fight with the Stellar Warden, it still had a significant amount of Heat.

Pressing his hand against the door once more,

“What if you had a sizable source of Fire mana?” Raiko asked him. “Would this enhance your [Archflame Coal’s] powers?”

“Maybe?” Sam hazarded. “I’m just as new to this as you.” Focusing, Sam tried to siphon the Heat from the coal into the door.

Nothing happened.

He tried harder, bending all of his thought and will to the [Archflame Coal]. But all it did was burn his hand, causing him to drop the coal, which had never hurt him before.

Kicking the door in frustration, Sam racked his brain for an answer.

“Sam,” Raiko said, motioning toward the coal.

It had become so hot it had melted through the stone floor, creating a small crater.

“I guess that explains why it burned me,” Sam said, looking at his reddened palm. It should have burned through his skin and bone, but it hardly even singed him.

And then Sam saw it.

The [Ember Vine Fruits] that had fallen near the dropped coal were glowing a dangerous orange-red and swelling as if they were about to burst.

Snatching the coal up, thankful it was merely comfortably warm now in his hand, Sam watched as the fruits dimmed. They were still nearly twice the size of the other fruits still on their vines, however.

Sam could feel a kinship with the fruits, not because of the coal, but because they had Fire mana. “I need more fruits.”

Raiko darted to the ceiling and swiped her blade through half a dozen of the vines at a time, dropping several clusters of berries to the floor all around Sam’s feet.

With a grateful nod in her direction, Sam picked up a few fruits and held them close to the coal. He had no idea what he was doing, but he felt close to a breakthrough.

He had Fire affinity, didn’t he? So there had to be a way to use that mana. Even if he couldn’t generate it himself, the doors didn’t care whose mana it was, did they?

It was clear from Raiko’s attempt to help that he couldn’t mix mana, but if he used all the Fire mana from the fruits, that should work.

The theory worked much better in his head.

Sam tried smashing the berries against the door. He tried holding them so close to the [Archflame Coal] that they burst on their own accord in miniature firebombs that did nothing but scorch his clothing and the door.

Again and again, Sam tried and failed to get the fruit to work. It had to work; he knew it should work. It felt like the world itself was mocking him.

The cave shook. Sam could practically feel the fetid breath of the ogre on the back of his neck. He had less than a minute before the quest failed, but if he stayed here trying to rescue the others, the ogre was bound to get to him.

And then he would consign Komachi and Kai to their deaths. He couldn’t stand the thought of failure or running away, but he couldn’t see any other way forward.

Just breathe, a voice whispered to him. It sounded suspiciously like his own… but he knew it wasn’t somehow. It had come from outside his head.

You’re forgetting something.

Sam frowned and looked at the coal, then at the fruits, and finally back at the door.

“A furnace needs its flames fanned, does it not?” Raiko asked with urgency.

“I don’t see how that’d help us get the mana into the door though,” Sam said distractedly. He picked up another fruit and held it in his open palm, placing his hands side by side so the fruit swelled and ripened with Fire mana.

As it did, Sam gently used his Void mana in a way similar to how he triggered [Scour], only many orders of magnitude weaker.

To his surprise—and singed eyebrows—a puff of Fire mana rose out of the berry and dissipated in the air. The berry was left as a husk that crumbled to dust in his hand.

But Sam had caught on to what he needed to do. A second attempt had him wrapping the Fire mana within the fruit—which he could only sense thanks to his affinity—in a thin barrier of Void mana.

This time, when he pushed out the Fire mana, it remained steady within its spherical barrier. It looked a bit like a glass sphere with a faint silvery sheen and within, against all probability, was a tiny flickering flame of Fire mana.

When Sam saw it, it reminded him of hope.

With Raiko’s help, he quickly went to work, expanding the idea. A single fruit, stoked by the [Archflame Coal] was hardly enough to budge the lock.

They needed many orders of magnitude more mana than that if they were going to get the doors open before the ogre found a way to him.

A scroll dropped into Raiko’s waiting hand, one markedly different from that of the [Escape Scroll]. This one was covered in glowing emerald glyphs. Just from its summoning, wind swirled through the chamber.

Running her hand along the scroll, glyphs flowed across her skin. The mana pouring out of her sheathed katana transformed into spinning whirls of slicing green.

With a mana-imbued slash, the Wind mana flowed around the Fire mana, feeding the flame and amplifying it in turn.

Working together, Sam ripened the [Ember Vine Fruits] with the [Archflame Coal], and then shunted their Fire mana into a beach ball sized shell of Void mana.

It took a surprisingly small amount of mana to support this, making Sam wonder if there was some efficiency bonus for using a high rarity mana type like his Void mana.

He shoved the thought aside for later and focused on the task at hand.

With the Fire mana within a central shell, Raiko’s addition of Wind mana performed precisely as she suggested. The Wind mana stoked the Fire mana, turning it from a faint orange to a raging inferno that Sam struggled to keep contained.

Thankfully, the Fire consumed the Wind. It fed off the mana, leaving only enhanced Fire mana in its wake.

With the last motes of his mana, Sam, standing in the center of the room with his large ball of Fire mana, created tubes of silvery-black Void mana that terminated at each door.

As he opened the floodgates, the flames raced out in a brilliant spectacle. The intricate lines on each door filled with flickering Fire mana, and the remaining doors were opened at last, just as a new notification popped up in Sam’s vision.

Quest Failed: Battle Royale I

You have failed to depart the starting island before the timer has run out. All current residents of the starting island are now considered [Marked For Death].