Luca DR
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The infinity dungeon 138
🕑 Added 2025-04-08 20:07:51 +0000 UTCChapter 138
We followed the sad road through meanderings of dead forests, bare hills, and purple-colored skies. Around us, I felt as if the world was closing in on us, like we were in a tunnel and only the things in our immediate surroundings were real. Thinking back about the nature of this place, I reckoned it made sense. In the last few days, my feeling for the Stone element had increased, allowing me to sense the boundary of the fabricated world whenever we got close to it.
Liff slept most of the time. She was very weak, barely even cried. Sometimes we would get attacked by monsters, and once I even tried to cook one of the carcasses on a diesel fire. It wasn’t edible, and the frustration led me to some devastation of the nearby terrain I'm not proud of.
There was a door at the end of the road. A solid pane of reinforced steel encased in the side of a hill, not too dissimilar to what we have built at the dungeon entrance in our property. I blasted it off its hinges with raw strength bolstered by a good dose of elemental manipulation. Liff jerked awake, and she wobbled down the tractor to stand beside me.
Ahead of us, the darkness of the tunnel threatened to spill out into the twilight fields. I froze for a moment, remembering the incident in the bio-lab tunnels, envisioning monsters worse than those I fought there, worse than those I fought here, perhaps a twisted amalgamation of the two. I almost died in those tunnels, against those aberrations created out of my own desire to live forever. Here, the monsters had been weaker so far, but the dungeon was not a safe place and I wasn't going to lower my guard.
For a moment, I asked myself: was I going to meet my end here?
A soft whimper behind me reminded me of the present. Liff was tugging on my shirt, eyes round and full of fear. I steeled myself, for her and for me both.
“Do we really have to go in there?” she asked.
I looked at her. “Your grandpa might be there. Your uncle Roger too,” I said.
She nodded slowly, taking strength from my presence while I did my best to hide my own doubts. There was no room for them here, because while this place might look real like the outside world, only twisted and perverted, it was not the real outside world. It was the dungeon, and this was one of its challenges.
For a moment I lost the sense that I was here for a reason, but looking at Liff reminded me of my own quest for strength again. If I didn’t have the strength to protect a little girl, alone and scared, on the verge of passing out because of how little food she had eaten in the last few days, could I really call myself a man?
I led the way for a few paces, then lifted Liff up on my shoulders. The tunnels were strangely large, the ceiling high enough that even with my height and Liff on top of me, there was room to spare. The silence of the tunnel was deceiving: there were monsters there. I spotted the first pair of deep, angry red eyes after a bend in the tunnel. They were hiding amidst rotting furniture. The monster thought it could escape me with its ability to move fast and not be hindered by the stone of the walls, but it didn’t take into account my own strength.
I manipulated the stone of the tunnel, making it harder to cross. I picked the monster up and slammed it against a wall, kicking it while Liff hung for dear life to my back. The monster hit the wall of the tunnel and did not get up, smashing a cabinet and revealing its contents in the process. There were cans of food there, still preserved after many years. I took the risk of the first bite, to make sure before I gave the food to the little girl, despite Liff looking at me like she wanted to cry.
She was a surprisingly well behaved girl, even in these conditions.
“I think it’s safe enough,” I told her. “I can’t read the language the expiration date is written, but I think you can eat it.”
She hesitated “I—I can?”
“Why not? You are starving!”
She took the can, eating with her bare hands. Despite the food, there were no utensils, but there was water. After a few big gulps, she looked at herself in shame and tried to clean herself with her shirt. I stopped her.
“My uncle Roger used to beat me up when I asked for more food,” she said hesitantly, “he said that little girls don’t need much food and that it was better used to feed the working men. When they went away, they took all the food we had with them. I hid some, but uncle Roger found it and, and—”
“Shh, it’s alright kiddo.” I took her hand, “you can eat. I won’t lay a hand on you.”
There was a moment of silence. Then a noise, and Liff looked around and huddled closer to me. She still hesitated, fearful that perhaps the action might elicit the same reaction it would have with her uncle Roger.
“The monsters won’t hurt you either,” I said with a grin that projected more arrogance than confidence, surely more than I actually felt, “I’ll make sure of that.”
Her eyes became misty. She opened her mouth to speak, but I shushed her. There was no need for thanks.
We took a long rest before resuming our travels. By the time we set out again, Liff was looking much better than she had before. She hadn’t looked too pleased when I made her stop eating the night before, but I know full well what eating too much does to your body when it’s not used to food anymore. I let her eat again after she woke up.
“Feeling better?”
“Mh hm,” she hummed. “I think I can stand on my own now.”
I smirked at her, “what, you don’t feel like being carried?”
“I don’t know…”
“I’m kidding,” I said, “I’ll only carry you if you want. You can walk if you want to walk.”
“I think I’ll walk, then!”
She psyched herself up, but after half an hour of walking she finally found the courage to ask me to be carried again. And it was a good thing, because we kept walking for a long time before we saw more movement. The monsters were getting frenzied, and the deeper we went inside the underground complex the more protective of its depths they seemed to become. The rooms, which had been mostly barren at first, now were more furnished.
There was no dust in sight. The eerie cleanliness of the place contrasted with the places where I did battle with the monsters, leaving behind a trail of trashed rooms. I almost felt guilty for it.
Eventually, we came upon some sort of control room. There were strange analog screens and computer-like contraptions that looked like futuristic computers in old science fiction. There were also many signs of battle. Unlike the other rooms before, this one was a mess. There was dust, mud, and caked blood everywhere. The floor was a maze of broken pipes, cables, and shards of glass. Bent and upturned tables had spilled their broken analog devices, exposing vacuum tubes with cracked bulbs and keyboards with strange letters.
There was a body at the far end of the room, close by a wall of broken monitors down a few concrete steps. It was hidden by a column, but by the time I saw it Liff had seen it as well. She recognized the old man immediately, running up to the corpse and hugging the desiccated remains.
“Grandpa!” she wailed. Her sobs were sad and terrible. “Heorest…”
They died down into moans, but I had no time to console her because I heard a click behind me. I turned around; a man was there, hands on his hips. He was wearing a lab coat that might have been white a long time ago but was now stained with blood, dirt, and man-made lubricant of some sort. The grease glimmered in the halogen lights of the room, which flickered now and then in tune with the sparks coming from the exposed wiring. Some of the analog screens displayed static, but they had been dark before and I had not seen them come alive.
I got up from where I was bending over Liff’s form, standing between her and the man. I was at least a foot and a half taller than him, but as I walked towards him he didn’t seem intimidated in the slightest. He looked at me, lifting his chin up to meet my eyes, and took out a pen from his front pocket. He clicked it once, then twice and then clicked his tongue.
“You’re new,” the man said. “You shouldn’t be here. Go away, outside, somewhere not here… before you upset the experiment even more.”
“No.”
“It’s not you I’m interested in,” the man continued. “It’s her. You are just a chaotic variable. And chaotic variables… have to be removed.”
“I will not repeat myself again: I said no.”
I surprised even myself by the anger I felt in that moment. My words were punctuated by my own aura expanding and filling the room, the elemental Stone singing in my ears like the rush of blood before a bloody battle. My muscles tensed, ready for action as my body coiled like a spring.
“What is your name?” the man asked, “I would like to know who I am about to kill.”
“David Chestermill,” I said. Then, looking at him in the eye while I cracked my knuckles, I smirked. “You must be Uncle Roger.”
