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The infinity dungeon 115
🕑 Added 2024-11-07 16:44:01 +0000 UTCChapter 115
Michael and Stephan looked at each other as they stood at the beginning of the dungeon’s fourth floor. Before them, mountains soared toward the sky like skinny fingers covered in snow, while in the distance, larger mountains made a crown that imprisoned the valley within its cold embrace. With his keen eyes, Michael could see hints of the valley below, conifer trees swaying in the wind, and with his keen ears hear the call of a raven circling high above. Below, he knew, the dwarves lay in wait. They were not simple triggered mechanics of a game-like dungeon, but flesh-and-blood creatures forced to do an unfathomable being’s bidding.
It was impossible to deny that the dungeon had helped him, but at the same time, Michael wasn't forgetting that the dungeon was also a strange creature who used lesser beings for unknown purposes. He might be among them, too.
“And yet, Infy asked me to track down the man behind the robes,” Michael mused aloud.
“Infy?” Stephan inquired.
“Yeah,” Michael replied. For a moment, he felt the Gaze settle upon him like a mantle. Warm. “The infinity dungeon, Infy.”
Stephan shook his head, exhaling through his nostrils. “How can you be so calm after all that’s happened?”
Michael shrugged. He had told the man a quick version of the events, leaving out the most gruesome details. “I don’t know. I would say that you get used to it, but I know it’s not true. It’s more like I get used to it, you know?”
Stephan nodded. “Yeah. I think I got a good enough picture. I knew intellectually that death is always around the corner, but this? And I didn’t even feel that aura!”
“Seeing how close one gets to death, and how easily…” he paused. “It changes you. Shall we leave?” Michael suggested.
Stephan nodded. As they made their way up the stairs, they greeted the warm summer air of the outside world with glee. It was hot and humid, but it was no bother to Michael. Stephan enjoyed it all of two seconds after being exposed to the dry cold of the mountains before he began to sweat.
“Will you come back?” Michael asked. “Or was this enough to last you a lifetime?”
“I’m tempted to say that it was,” the sensei admitted, “but I’m willing to come back, both for you and for me. Just, like I said at the beginning, I don’t want to be exposed to unnecessary danger.”
“Some danger is inevitable,” Michael pointed out.
“I understand that,” Stephan acknowledged. “I’m not so naive to believe that you, even with all your power, can protect me from everything that might happen in there. I’m talking about the variables you can control, not those you have no power over.”
“Deal.”
“Deal,” Stephan agreed. “But now, I think it’s time to head home.”
“There will be a car waiting for you back at the site.”
As Stephan turned to leave, Michael stopped him, holding out a hand. “Before that, give me your phone.”
Stephan’s eyes narrowed, but he did as told. Michael touched the sensei’s phone to his own, and an icon appeared.
“My phone’s an Android while yours is an iPhone. How did you do that?” Stephan questioned, surprised.
“Secret,” Michael responded with a mischievous smile. He pointed at the new, sleek white icon. It featured flowing black lines—Unity’s logo—and a single red triangle superimposed over them—Icarus’ logo. “This is our AI. It’s a true AI. Talk to it, make it do things for you, use it however you want. Most of all, it helps you keep track of the real world after you spend so much time in the dungeon. It can bring you back up to speed with what you left on hold while you delved.”
“Thank you,” Stephan said gratefully. Michael appreciated the fact that the sensei did not ask how Icarus happened to know all that it had to know about someone to bring them back to speed. In the end, even though Travis had not hacked Google, Johanne still went ahead and wrestled access to most of the internet from whoever was holding it hostage and diverted a good part of it to her pet AI.
As soon as his sensei was gone, Michael immediately went back inside. According to Icarus, Johanne was in the Misty Valley, and indeed that was where he found her. She was fiddling with some sort of portal construct, flooded with Space and Time energy, muttering about time-invariant fields to herself. Studying the inscriptions, Michael could somewhat divine what the pinky-sized portal was supposed to do, but he still asked her.
“I want to bring cell signal down here,” she said nonchalantly. “This portal should allow for the signal to come through. If not, I’ll simply run a cable through it.”
Michael frowned. “What about the time dilation?”
Johanne nodded, getting up from inspecting the inscribed stones with an expression that was a mix of pride and smugness. “As expected, you understand the issue immediately. But, allow me to boast, I have devised a clever idea. See, this antenna is hooked up to a low-power Electrical magic stone. Before you ask, we have found fewer than five of them on the whole floor, and they are barely enough to work as low-power batteries.”
She sighed. “But I digress. This antenna and the server stack in that box provides local network connectivity. It is connected to other antennas scattered throughout the Valley—each hooked to a different power system so that they double as proof of concept for mana-batteries, infinite water wheels, and other things. The problem, as you said, is the time dilation. I managed to make the portal open, connected to a sister device outside, but when I did, the time dilation factor of the valley dropped to zero, becoming in sync with the normal flow of time.”
“To rectify this,” she continued, “I have ordered the technomancer to write code, which Icarus then checked, so that the internal Valley network periodically checks whether the devices connected to it need access to the outside internet infrastructure—a process made easier by Icarus itself, since it can just sync the requests. When needed, this portal will open for a fraction of a second and sync with the outside in a rapid burst of data exchange.”
Michael nodded, impressed. “This way, the time dilation is only lost for fractions of a second at a time. Clever.”
Unfortunately, Michael could see that the portal would only work within close proximity to a powerful source of mana, Time, and Space, which made it impractical for use for any long-distance transportation system. For now, at least.
Johanne beamed, as proud and smug as ever. “Alas, this is not the reason for your visit, is it?”
“It’s not,” Michael confirmed.
Instead of talking at the portal, the two decided to talk over some Fae tea. The Fae were strange, a myriad of different races each with their own peculiarities. While the more brutish of the Fae contributed meat and ale to the feasts, the more refined of them provided tea and sweets. When summed up together, there was never a shortage of any kind of food at their feasts, and the tables were always overflowing with anything one might desire.
Lately, Unity staff had noticed a decrease in the amount of food at the Fae feasts. Unity had been using the feasts as a way to stock their canteen for a while, but their growing needs were beginning to have repercussions. They cut back on their consumption as other ways to get food were being explored outside, like using magic to grow crops, while at the same time, a stopgap measure was discovered. They could trade magic coins to boost the output of the feasts simply by giving them to whichever Fae was tasked with gathering the food that day.
The conversion ratio was good enough, and it amused Johanne to no end to see the dungeon’s own coins—given as a reward to the delvers and the Fae—used back in the dungeon to get more resources. It was also opening the way for more experimentation with garbage disposal and the like, and it appeared from preliminary tests that the dungeon didn’t care much about the nature of what was being dumped into it. It simply took raw matter and dissolved it. Sometimes it would ‘burp’ up coins and items—as some Operators had begun to say—although it wasn’t clear if it was a reward, a random mechanic, or an incentive to do it more.
Michael and Johanne talked for a while. It was mostly Michael at the beginning, recounting the events that had happened on the fourth floor. But when he got to the betrayal, Johanne was suddenly inflamed.
“Filthy half-men! How dare—”
“Chill,” Michael interrupted.
She sat back down. “Apologies, my lord. It is just that I would never think such low creatures would be capable of such treachery.”
“Hmm,” Michael hummed, holding it while he pretended to think. “But the strangest thing of all, Johanne, was not them or their betrayal. They pretty much confessed to it when they claimed to have no values anymore. No, what’s strangest is what happened when the man behind the betrayal showed up. Or, I expected it to be a man, woman, or monster. What showed up were loose robes, with nobody inside.”
Johanne frowned. “Remotely controlled?”
“I thought as much,” Michael stated. “It was evident by the way mana behaved, although it was interesting that the robes themselves possessed an aura.”
“Do you think it was generated artificially, or was it part of the projection?” Johanne inquired.
Michael smiled. “Always inquisitive. But that, too, is not the interesting part. You see, he mentioned you.”
Johanne’s body language suddenly shifted. Michael didn’t need the Truth facet’s help to see that she was hiding something.
“He said,” Michael continued, “that it was a mistake to trap you and that he should have killed you in the first place.”
He looked at her, “now, do you think it was just random happenstance that I met him in the fourth floor, or did you perhaps happen to do something—something I am unaware of—to attract his attention?”
Michael didn't think that Johanne’s face could lose more color than it already had, yet she paled.
“My lord,” she threw herself at his feet, “it might have been my actions that almost brought ruin upon you. Please, punish this unworthy servant.”
Michael’s eyes narrowed. His aura radiated from his body, clashing with hers. She wasn’t even defending, but even if she had been, it wouldn’t have made a difference. Michael had learned a lot about auras lately, even more so after his brief confrontation with the mysterious robes. Johanne’s aura was a False sort of Silver, a mere layering of Qi and mana. But the foundation, made of mana, was shaky. It didn’t have the stabilizing factors that Michael’s aura had. His was True Silver to her False one, and its quality was so great it could resist even the aura coming from the robes themselves, no matter what arcane energies of higher tiers tried to squash him.
Johanne was brought to the floor by Michael’s sheer power.
“None of that, Johanne,” he said angrily. “I don’t want any groveling. This farce has gone on long enough. I don’t want a servant who kneels before me awaiting judgment. I thought I had made it clear, yet now you revert back to this behavior as soon as there are problems bigger than just normal administration. Get up and explain what you did.”
