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1070 Words
Increasing the amount of mana he sent into them, he found that the gravity well grew stronger and stronger. He’d need to do some testing, but the scaling seemed better than linear.
And that made sense. Not many people could use a channeled item if the requirements were too high.
As he hit 20 MPS, Matt felt something shift in the gloves and affect the world around him. It felt like everything was locked down, and he was unable to move even a little.
He felt like an impassable object, and that anything that came near him would be shredded apart.
At this point, his spirit started to feel strained by the constant use of a Tier 14 item, but he had dealt with far worse from his skills.
Taking the test to the next level, Matt increased the mana to just over 50 MPS over the course of a few seconds.
The rocks weren’t the only things sucked into him. The ground near his feet was starting to be ripped up, and joined the other rocks that were already pressed on his gauntlets.
As he hit 100 MPS, the items on his gauntlets started to compress under the power of gravity, and enough of the material from the surroundings had wrapped around Matt that he had to use [Earth Manipulation] to keep himself from getting crushed. He created a pocket for his body to reside in, pushing against the weight of his own mana with…more of his own mana. He tried to channel even more into the gauntlets, to push beyond just a bare smidgen of his mana, but they seemed to be capped at 100 mana each second.
Ending his test, Matt stepped down and paused for a moment to inspect the ground that he was unable to manipulate, and his new gauntlets were unable to rip up either.
Without his normal proprioception, he was only able to inspect them with his spiritual senses, but they had become quite sensitive over the last four days. Sill, the remaining ground just felt like normal stone, for all that he was unable to affect it.
Returning to the group, Matt said, “Well, they affect gravity, and they’re definitely strong.”
Liz scoffed over their AI and said, “Yeah, except the fact you had to throw a hundred MPS at the problem. We can’t really use them as effectively, so you might as well keep them.”
Susanne nodded. “And we have our outer armor that we can’t exchange the gauntlets out for without breaking the item with enchantment. You only have under armor, which is a blouse and trousers.”
“Well, they do have a limit of about a hundred mana per second…” he protested. It was…actually a lot, he realized. Even if he blasted Liz with his full Concept, she could only use them for a little under two minutes before she ran out. He, meanwhile, could use them very effectively.
Aster wasn’t bothered at all by the gauntlets, as she had no hands to use them, and jumped into Matt’s arms, starting to ask about what it felt like to use the item.
Matt used that as an excuse to explain everything he had learned. “The gauntlets have a gravity field that ramps up pretty fast and is extremely effective. We’ll need to see if it brings in magical attacks along with mana and essence, as normal gravity does, but these brought in matter quite well, and even started to compress it.”
Before he had left, he had gathered the bits of stone that had compressed down to denser versions of themselves. He didn’t have nearly enough power to perform actual atomic fusion, but he had compressed the stone into something denser.
“Beyond that, I felt like I was a rock at the center of the universe. Everything would move before I did. I was immovable.”
Matt flexed his hand even though he couldn’t see anything and inspected the gauntlets once again.
They went nearly up to his elbows and were made of a thin metal alloy that he wasn’t able to identify without his sight and better tools.
He was quite happy with what they could do and felt like a kid on his birthday.
The rest of the evening, he played with his new item and tried to learn how they worked. As far as he could tell, he was unable to limit the directional force of the gravity, but he wasn’t sure if that was a limit of the item, or his understanding of said item.
Normal gravity was omnidirectional, but he didn’t think the item was so limited.
Still, everyone got a good three hours of sleep before they moved on and traveled down the tunnel they had entered.
When they had first entered, the path deeper had been over a hundred feet tall, but as they progressed further with not an enemy or trap in sight, the tunnel got smaller and smaller until they were walking single file.
Just as they were scraping their shoulders on the walls, their spiritual perception found the exit, and they carefully crept up to it.
They once again entered a massive cavern. Liz, with her more sensitive blood, sent out feelers and reported back. “Something is eating at my skills. It’s not destroying the blood, but rather my mana inside of it.”
After a few more tests, they determined they had found a pool of Mana Leeches.
The monsters were, as their name suggested, leeches that ate mana, not blood. If they were just able to drain people with direct contact, that would have been something easily countered. But they had an aura they exuded that was able to drain any mana that entered their sphere of influence.
Liz was excited, and started planning their expedition into the cavern’s lagoons as soon as they suspected the Mana Leeches as the reason for her skill’s dissipation. Mana Leeches created environments where rare herbs and natural treasures existed in large quantities.
They ate the mana that the items would produce, and therefore hid them from casual inspection and location through spiritual senses, as the lack of mana would make it harder to identify what was inside.
Matt spent half an hour creating a formation to push back the Mana Leeches’ aura before they walked into the main cavern.
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