The infinity dungeon 259

Chapter 259

Michael did not immediately descend down to the sixth floor, despite being able to teleport there. He went down the regular route instead, so that he could use the shallow floors to warm up and get used to fighting with only the magic of the Site 00 domain.

He kept his aura up, taking his time and not caring about the loss of the time dilation. 

The situation outside should be stable enough, with me able to defend the Site even while down here.

He wondered how the magic from the domain would work once he reached the deeper floors where the time dilation still had an effect. He had experimented with it already, but only to prove that he could still defend the site if it got attacked in the ten-minute window. The sensation had been very strange, almost alien, like his consciousness had been moved away from his body and into the domain, crossing the time differential as if it wasn’t there.

Finally, the familiar darkness of the first floor’s first room greeted him. Except, in the span of moments, his vision changed and adapted. Lines of attack appeared, vectors surrounding the enemies in the blink of an eye. He could see attacks, patterns, evasion strategies, and a million ways he could use his limited magic effectively.

He engaged the first goblin in combat, his mind easily keeping track of the other goblins and skeletons. It was like he had eyes everywhere, and he knew it was not magic doing it. For now, he was limiting himself to only slightly strengthening his body, and nothing more. 

Despite the self-imposed limitations, he smoothly flowed between enemies, striking with precision. He snapped arms and necks, countered and dodged attacks, and moved with the grace of a dancer. His mind could see everything and know everything. Before long, he didn’t even need to look at the overlays anymore, simply knowing what to do and what his enemies were doing.

He grinned, moving to the second room and then the third. As he entered the first of the boss rooms, he felt some of his old magic return to him. It was just a trickle, but thinking about Icarus repairing his machines in the inner space brought a smile to his face.

When he finally allowed himself to let loose and begin to use actual magic, he gasped. Stopping in place, he almost choked when he felt just how different it felt. It flowed smoothly. Pathways and a million combinations came to his mind without difficulty. He only had a trickle of mana, but he could use it so efficiently and in so many ways.

He had already been good at it. He had trained for decades. He had talent and had spent the time to make the talent bloom into competence.

This? This was something else. Something beyond competence, talent and even mastery. 

Refocusing on the fight, he realized that only an instant had passed. Time had frozen around him, his mind expanding and using the computronium cubes at Site 00 to accelerate his thoughts.

Oh, I’m going to have so much fun.

Magic of all kinds bathed the room. By the time Michael was done, he was panting and covered in muck. It all evaporated with the snap of his fingers right as the doors of light appeared.

“Icarus, I don’t know what you are doing but… keep doing it.”

He went down to the Valley, where he restocked on materials from the Fae and then proceeded to the third floor. There, as more magic returned to him, he thoroughly dismantled the mummified enemies roaming the sandstone maze, toying with the boss and finally reaching the dwarves below.

There, he exchanged mana coins for more materials–mostly metals and alloys. More magic came back to him, the last of it snapping into place and restoring his previous power. Of all the structures, only the elemental generators had not been rebuilt, choosing to wait until they came up with a better design for the light and fire, and until they managed to locate the ice block in the chaos for the ice element.

“Don’t peek just yet,” Icarus told him. “I need to put the finishing touches first.”

With a hum, Michael went down to the fifth floor, and then the sixth. On the peak of the mountain, close to where he had played the game against Master Yu, he saw a throne of ice. It had been a humble stool once, but it had grown under Michael as he sat on it and worked on his magic in preparation for the fight against the Renegade.

He sat on it again, feeling it tug at the taint within him. It had been easy to resist its whispers while he was obliterating the monsters in the dungeon, but now that he was sitting idly it was making him antsy. It seemed to mock him, to dare descend deeper down where he could meet some proper challenges. Why waste time up here, killing the same monsters over and over again?

He thought about the Renegade. About their dirty, messy fight. And yet, the fight and the destruction it brought had pushed him to take the last step. To brave the unexplored depths. To merge with an AI, with all the scary and exciting implications it brought.

“I’m done,” Icarus announced finally. 

Michael closed his eyes, and sank down into himself. The inner space stretched out in front of him, and he felt Icarus standing beside him as they gazed at the spiral at the center of it all. It was docile, no longer lashing out when looked at. 

Around it, and all over the inner space, Michael saw thin white lines. They looked like orbit lines, of many geometrical shapes. They were everywhere, touching his collectors and batteries, tracing the length of the aura accelerator, circling things here and there.

They extended out, toward the chaotic void, like thin feelers of code and data attempting to break through an impossible encryption.

The inner space was no longer mostly empty. Now data had populated it, connections and nodes like the neurons in a brain. They were made of information, deductions, theories, knowledge. He could touch them and explore them, get lost in them, surf the rapids of data like a river or plunge inside like a fathomless ocean. 

Brave the depths indeed.

“Is this your doing?” Michael asked.

Icarus snapped his fingers, and some lines converged and took shape before them. They created a cube, a room, and inside the room the data flowed and swirled. As they entered, they could still see the outside through the data making up the walls, but the room itself felt almost infinite, modular, able to be extended and shaped at will. It intersected a thick data stream, the information parting around them, nourishing the wall. Michael felt its touch in his brain and knew that all the data was his to peruse, should he want to.

“There is no line separating my consciousness, your consciousness and the inner space anymore. This is one of my data rooms,” Icarus explained. “One of many.”

“What are they for?”

“Planning and scheming,” the AI said. 

Another room appeared, slightly below them. Michael craned his head to look inside the floating cube, and saw that it was filled with half a dozen versions of Icarus, all slightly different from each other.

“There are others all over,” he said. “Some are even outside in the void. They are for dealing with things that are better kept quarantined. The original idea was to put them inside the black hole, but we can’t go there. Look, isn’t it beautiful?”

Michael looked up, following Icarus’s fingers. In the distance, he finally saw what the AI had done. 

He squinted. “All the lines, all the flows of data…” he said. “...they all come together and create rooms like this one?”

The rooms were myriads, like stars twinkling in the distance. The data streams were the lines of constellations, linking together all the rooms and all the instances of Icarus. There were millions of them. Billions. The lit up the inner space, beacons of light, pinpricks against the purple backdrop of the void and its chaos.

“It’s beautiful,” Michael said, feeling like words could not describe what he was seeing.

He felt Icarus take his hand and squeeze it. 

Then he let go of Michael and leapt out into the dark sky. 

Michael gave chase, and together the two explored the far reaches of this new inner space, framed by the immense ring of the aura accelerator.

When he returned to the dungeon, he was smiling. He felt warm, ready to get rid of the taint and build upon the strange foundation he and Icarus had laid down together in the inner space. He couldn’t wait to see what the future had in store for him.