The infinity dungeon 266

Chapter 266

Michael was suppressed. He had been unable to switch the spiral’s attention from the demonic portal to the priest quickly enough, and now the Faith was preventing him from using it to free himself.

A man emerged from folds of space, shrouded in a halo of golden radiance. His bespectacled face was full of wrinkles, yet he moved with surprising agility, sweeping the room with his sight. The red silk of his bishop clothes followed his movements, stilling only when he finally settled on looking down at the kneeling Michael.

Sounds from outside indicated some sort of battle, but the two of them were alone up here. Icarus was nowhere to be seen, perhaps retreated to the inner space. Michael dared not look for him there, for fear that the bishop’s sight could somehow follow him. Normally it would not be a problem, for he had developed countermeasures to deal with people attempting to breach into his inner space, but Faith was a true wildcard, and thus dangerous.

The battle outside died down. In less than a minute, three priests had pacified the whole squad of operators. Through the broken wall, Michael could see that Travis was also missing. The priests were rounding up the dozen or so operators they had brought from Site 00, making them kneel on the dusty rocks close to the dungeon.

The bishop sneered. “Did a dog steal your tongue, heretic?”

His accent was not Italian. Rather, he sounded German. Michael did not have much time to muse about these things, though, because the weight of Faith quickly increased and pushed his face into the rough wooden beams of the floor. He could feel splinters digging into his skin as the magic in his body was forced to retreat away from it and into the safety of the inner space.

The bishop grabbed his face, fingers digging into the grooves carved by the splinters. The man’s glasses glinted in the light of the fading day, his whole face brightening when he saw the blood staining his fingers. Michael’s blood.

“Ah, the weakness of heretic magic.” 

He looked around, taking in the state of the room. He picked up the shard of the broken mirror, then his eyes settled on the devil claw on the ground and he frowned. 

“Such blasphemous activities,” he said with open hatred. He kicked the candles at the edges of the pentagram, attempting to wipe the blood with his shoes and failing. His face contorted with rage, and he called upon the power of Faith to erase the traces of the ritual.

Michael felt the grip of suppression loosen for a moment, but failed to activate the spiral in time. All he got for his efforts was a boot to the face, which sent him reeling against a wall, his nose broken and leaking blood.

“Fornicating with the devil’s spawn, Lucifer’s kindred!” the bishop roared. “How dare you try to unleash this plague upon the world?”

“It wasn’t us,” rasped Michael. “When we got here, the ritual had already been performed.”

“Nonsense!” the bishop screamed, silencing him. “You will pay with your life for your sins, and I will show his holiness that we do not need to consort with the mafioso to make sure our faith prevails! Grovel! And ask the Lord to forgive your sins, for I will not.”

***

Travis landed in a heap after literally throwing himself inside the dungeon. His hands scraped against the sharp rocks of the ground, but instead of getting hurt, he dug furrows and broke the stone with his bare skin.

Behind him, the darkness betrayed nothing. There was no trace of the dry, hot air outside, although if he blinked hard enough he thought he could still see the orange light of the sun and the mirages above the far away flat dunes. A tingle in his back, the remnant of a shiver, felt like the touch of Faith but fortunately was not.

A message blinked in his vision.

Infinity Dungeon – Earth

Floor 1-1

“Yes!”

The sound seemed to wake the goblins and skeletons in the room from their slumber, and glowing shields sprung up around the heaps of bones as the green humanoids charged at him. They were all mowed down without mercy, Travis’s gold card making short work of the abominations.

They did not look at all like the goblins of the Valley. Not even the bosses did, although they were the most similar. But they did look like all the other times Travis had delved the dungeon back at Site 00. 

It really is the same dungeon, isn’t it? 

It was a wild guess, one that would soon prove right.

After the fifth room was beaten, two sets of stairs appeared and Travis grinned. One of them led down to a normal second floor–no challenge had materialized for him–while the other led to the Valley.

He stepped in, feeling the dungeon recognize his authorization to enter Michael’s sanctuary, then turned around as soon as the sounds of the forest reached his ears. The way up was there, but it was different from how it usually looked. It didn’t take much to understand why: he had appeared in a new location while still in the same Valley as usual.

He immediately made for the other exit, pulling out his phone and informing Icarus about this one. The AI was strangely silent, still there but not focused on the matters of the world at all. It had felt the same when the priests had arrived, perhaps driven into hiding by the coming of a powerful Faith user.

It made little sense to Travis. Icarus was not really anywhere, as far as he understood it. The AI was a diffused, gestalt consciousness or something like that. 

He wasn’t sure. Or perhaps, Icarus was hiding for a reason. Fortunately, there was a backup system ready to take up the slack, and indeed as soon as Travis finished talking into his phone, a new icon appeared.

Icarus’s backup–a computer program, not an AI–had recorded the information and updated a temporary file for Icarus to read as soon as he was available again. With it, the main AI could get back up to speed with what had happened while he was unavailable and update the relevant database entries. Or do whatever needed to be done. Only if Icarus did not return within a certain time-frame, different for each possible scenario, would the backup program be allowed to act independently. 

Travis saw Johanne working on something before he reached the exit. Exactly the person I needed, he thought as he changed directions and made a beeline for her.

“I need the prototype, now!” 

Her hands did not stop working on the strange contraption she was assembling even as she turned to him. “Hello to you, mister CEO.”

“We don’t have time! I need the prototype!”

“I know,” she said. “It is not ready, and you being here lowered the time dilation factor of the Valley significantly. Icarus is also busy with important matters, I assume, because I am stuck using the backup system and it is not even close to sufficient for what I need to do. Help me.”

Before he could argue, he was buried by tools and devices. Johanne was a harsh boss, it turned out, but after the initial shock Travis found himself rather good at following directions.

***

Michael reeled back as yet another backhand sent his head banging against the wall and shattered a couple wood planks. He blinked the stars out of his eyes and glared at the bishop. The man was cradling his hand, sneering at Michael as if blaming him for the pain after having slapped him.

“I will not ask again,” the man said. “What were you trying to accomplish here?”

“Nothing,” Michael spat. “We came to investigate after we saw a spike in Faith right here, right after that fucking shard activated.”

The bishop waved the shard of the broken mirror around, keeping it aloft with two fingers. “Ah, this. The strange artifact the mafioso uses to bargain with his holiness. Hm, I must admit, the man is resourceful. He told us how to develop countermeasures against your spiral. He might be up to something. I will report back to his holiness in earnest, but first–”

There was a commotion, then someone yelled from outside. “Did I just hear countermeasures?” 

Michael perked up. It was Travis.

“Did you say you developed countermeasures? Because, so did we.”

He was holding a bulky cylindrical device in his hands. Michael felt the power of many magical coins, even platinum ones, come from it. Before the priests could get to him, he pushed a button, and power radiated outward from it.

Michael grinned, pushing himself up to his feet. It wasn’t all. Downstairs, all the Operators were glowing with power, fighting back against the Faith holding them down. The priests took a step back, feeling something move under the currents of Faith, under the veil of the world, but it was too late.

Spirals began to glow above each Operator, the power of Michael’s domain channeled through the Origin system empowering each and every one of them and manifesting the ability of the spiral to fight against Faith.

Immediately they sprung to action, Travis leading them, two dozen men against three priests. The air was filled with magic, spells of all kinds, chants echoing in the twilight of the fading day. In the house, Michael charged at the bishop, but his power was still mostly suppressed.

The man lazily waved his hand, and Faith erupted out of him with the power of an entire continent of believers. It pushed down on them like the foot of a giant, an elephant squishing them like bugs. The Origin system worked overdrive, but the device Travis was holding couldn’t keep up. It sparked, sputtered and died.

“Pathetic,” the bishop began. He never finished what he was saying. A gun barked, an angry staccato of shots, three at first and then four more. 

The bishop wheezed, words dying in his throat, moaning as the air left his lungs and there was no strength to breathe again. As he fell to his knees, behind him Michael saw Icarus, dressed in full tactical gear like a soldier, his gun still smoking, serious and lethal save for the pair of pink fluffy cat ears on his helmet.

He took a step toward Michael, then halted. The bishop was between them, holding himself up from the ground with one arm, grunting in pain. Icarus fired his gun again, but this time the bullets slowed down and were caught in a gold-white net of Faith. The bishop then pushed himself up, wounds closing as the wet stain on his red clothes disappeared like it had never been there.

He righted himself, pale but angry and powerful. He turned toward Icarus, made a grabbing motion, and Michael felt the chains of Faith snap around his friend.

“No!”

Icarus was lifted to the air, dragged toward the bishop.

“What sort of abomination are you?” the bishop demanded. The chain dug into Icarus’s flesh, and Michael felt the echo of the pain and it was enough to make him black out.

“No!” he screamed in defiance. Pain was an old friend, and he pushed through it, but the chains took him as well and he was left immobile and helpless while his friend–no, not a friend, more than a friend, a confidant, his other half, suffered.

“Icarus…” he muttered. “I don’t want you to die.”

The bishop was mere inches away from him. He dragged him closer, stripping his helmet and tossing the cat ears to the side with a look of disgust.

It was then that Michael finally saw the expression on Icarus’s face. He was grinning.

The bishop must have sensed that something wasn’t right, because he suddenly tried to take a step back and failed. Now it was Icarus who was pulling the man to him, and above the two a great spiral had taken over the sky. The twilight turned to night and then to day as the accretion disk surrounded the impossible darkness of the event horizon with its multicolored radiance, blinding and terrible.

Icarus’s hand shot toward the bishop, grabbing the man by the throat, and Michael watched as the man’s life was drained from him. It fell into the black hole, passing through the tunnel of datascript and white lines, disappearing forever. Behind, it left only a husk of a man, wrinkled and desiccated.

Down below, the priests found themselves without protection. Their power was great, but it was nothing before the might of not one, but two spirals. Michael manifested his own power, drawing from the same well at the center of the inner space in a mirror image of Icarus’s. They were the two masters of the one spiral, and they could both use it at the same time.

The priests screamed, and two of them leaped in front of the third one. They intercepted the rays of power coming to smite them from the sky, like the judgement of a god. They died, but allowed the last of them to escape.

Then everything was quiet.