CH268

“What the hell are you doing?” Greed yelled as Ben’s cupped palm was lowered to him as it slowly filled with blood.

“Hopefully getting you food. Now come on and drink up. Worst to worst I can cut off some skin if you need it, but let’s see if a liquid diet can sate you for now.”

“Legs, you’re being crazy! I can’t just drink your blood!”

“Greed, for our best chance you need your strength. I’m going to be relying on your buffs and healing almost constantly while we’re stuck in here so I need you to be in good shape for casting magic. I’m not just asking you to do this for you, I’m asking you to do it for me.”

Positioning it as something for his own sake as well helped break down Greed’s resistance as he leaned in and started drinking.

Ben’s first instinct was to ask how it tasted, wanting some confirmation on his belief that he might just be unusually tasty, but held back in consideration for the other man. He wasn’t lying after all, he needed Greed, so he didn’t want to do anything that would put him off of eating.

It was only as he had his fill that he stopped, giving an impression of being deeply conflicted as he did and healed the cut on Ben’s hand before buffing both his mana and mana regen at his request.

With that done, Ben walked up to the pile of items again, this time taking what seemed to be a broken fragment of something, a piece of metal about as large as his palm, and sat down to stare at it. He was determined to survive and that meant using everything at his disposal, so with that goal in mind he’d decided he would figure out how to use his newest skill, material user.

He was all but certain it had to be a non-affinitied magic skill. The fact that he hadn’t heard of it before meant it was on the rarer end of the spectrum, but that didn’t matter. He had read hundreds of books on magic at this point, even without a guide, he could figure it out.

From the name alone, it sounded like a magic that could be used on anything like telekinesis would, the main question was how. He ran his mana into the piece of metal in his hand, and with an effort of will, made it rise up about a foot above where he was holding it, bringing a smile to his face until he almost immediately felt the effects of mana exhaustion, only stopping in time to keep himself from passing out.

Well, that’s not good.

Just how costly doing something as small as that was proof enough that whatever the magic did, it probably wasn’t meant to be used for combat. While it was common knowledge that non-affinitied magics had significantly steeper mana costs to do the same thing as an equivalent affinitied magic, with that difference only growing depending on how good of an affinity a mage had, that still felt unusually steep. He was being buffed to the extreme and had almost run out of mana in seconds, if he’d attempted it without the buff who could know how long he would be out for?

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