The infinity dungeon 242

Chapter 242

Walking around Site 00, Michael realized that despite all the time he had spent here, he had never found his true place. He had never made himself at home. 

The Valley felt more like home than Site 00 did, despite being a location inside a strange, extradimensional dungeon that wanted nothing more than to kill him and eat his soul.

At least, some people thought the dungeon wanted to kill people and eat their souls. He really didn’t know, and the only person who he could ask was Infy and he did want to not ask her. Even if he did ask, she probably was not going to tell him, not yet. He had gleamed much about the dungeon from their conversations, but it had always been in a roundabout way and each new nugget of information had only sparked more questions.

For instance, while Infy seemed indifferent to the dungeon itself–seeing it more as a tool than a malicious entity, its evils only the result of its rules–whatever they may be–she hated and feared its creator. 

Michael was not sure whether this creator was a man, a god, a machine, or an entire civilization. If there was only one or if there were many. Infy herself had first mentioned a creator and then multiple creators, as if she herself did not know.

He was not sure this entity was even still alive and kicking. Infy had hinted at its return, one day, and at the conflict that would come. She had mentioned Michael seizing control of the dungeon, once again treating it as a tool, a mere tool, a powerful tool, but a tool nonetheless. One that was still chaining her and binding her even though she was no longer its spirit.

He sat.

The hills and mountains of Site 00 were easily visible from the top of the central tower, where Michael's idle wanderings had brought him. He did not remember flying up here, and was now sitting on an exposed steel beam, legs dangling fifty stories up into the sky, a silhouette against the grey clouds. The rain had picked up again, as had the wind. It howled sinister tunes from deep within the still-exposed top of the tower, where Michael’s brief battle against the Renegade had caused three entire stories to vanish, and several more floors to be reduced to bent rebar and twisted beams.

An angle grinder cut through the howls of the wind, mankind against nature, both sides now wielding magic to enhance their natural selves. The storm was only barely slowing the reconstruction efforts down, with Operators deploying miniature versions of the shield that had caused the storm in the first place to keep the elements out.

Michael let it all wash over him as he closed his eyes. The inner space stretched out in front of him, the terrible spiral black hole at its center calling and beckoning, pulling his gaze into it with the gravity of a collapsed star.

The elven temple passed between him and the black hole. For a moment, he thought about doing something about it, but now was not the time.

“The boundary. I need to deal with the boundary.”

Beyond the black hole, behind him, above and below. The boundary was the membrane that contained all of the inner space and beyond which nothing existed. The blackness of nothing was strange today, however. 

He squinted. There were specks of light within it, moving around, coming into existence and then vanishing in an instant. The void was not empty, not anymore.

It was a frothing of particles and strangeness. If anything, it looked much more dangerous than just a regular void. It churned, creating and destroying, formless but endless in capabilities, the raw materials of existence itself. Watching it was entering a trance state, dangerous and alluring.

Michael flew close to a damaged section of the boundary. Like a torn cloth, its edges were ragged and ribbons of membrane still clung to them, stretching toward the source of gravity that was the black hole at the center. The specks of light outside looked the same from up close, completely insensitive to scale.

“Scale invariant,” Icarus supplied. “It means that their structures are self similar at all scales.” 

“And yet you do not know what they are,” Michael said.

Icarus was smart, smarter than he could ever be by several orders of magnitude, but struggled when he had to deal with magic. He could not make sense of it. He could not truly understand it.

Michael, on the other end, had no trouble connecting with the strange nature of the arcane. It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t always make sense. In fact, more often than not it just made no sense, but he could relate to it. It was almost like he could empathise with it. He could touch it and he could talk with it. The struggle was understanding what the magic said back to him, because it did not speak with words or concepts or even logic.

Outside the boundary, the specks of light when blended together looked like a dim red-brown soup. The color was very faint, but the intact parts of the boundary were perfectly black and the contrast was too stark to ignore or pretend it was a figment of the imagination. 

It was real. The outside had changed. It felt different, dangerous. Michael could tell because it spoke to him of danger and terrible power. 

Pulling an entire steel beam from the real world through a normal patch of boundary membrane nearby, Michael dipped it into the strange primordial soup outside.

Merely a fraction of a second later, he dragged it back in, encountering some resistance. There was almost nothing left of the beam, and what little of it there was had been completely melted and eaten by something much worse than the strongest acid.

Michael’s lips tightened. “Dangerous,” he muttered, shaking his head. This stuff was mere inches away from him, threatening to spill in as soon as what little of the boundary was left finally gave up.

It might have talked to him, but it would not hesitate to eat and digest all of his inner space if given the chance.

He turned his back to it. The vastness of the inner space before him was like a glass marble with little things inside of it, tiny etchings that glinted in the light of the accretion disk. The Aura Accelerator was a thin band of metal and energy, its diameter less than a tenth of the whole size of the space. 

“I have an idea and you are not going to like it, Icarus.”

“I’m all ears,” the AI said.

Running a finger on the boundary membrane, he felt it stretch like an elastic fabric. Close to the frayed edges, however, it was rigid, parts of it flaking off and falling down into the black hole.

“The boundary is no longer repairing itself,” he said. “The damage is too great.”

His finger reached the edge and he pulled it back, quickly, before the impulse to plunge it into the unknown other side overwhelmed him. He could not tell if this version of the call of the void had originated from the void, or from his own mind. The same way he could not tell when the same urge came upon him as he gazed at the black hole.

Was it magic’s doing, or his own? Was there any difference?

“It is going to break down eventually,” he continued. “And it’s going to happen at the worst possible moment. Might as well give it a little push, and do it in a controlled manner.”

“You want to break the boundary? You saw what that… chaotic soup did to the steel beam!”

Michael ignored him. “Can you pull all the machines inside the radius of the Aura Accelerator, please?”

Magic began to flow, and what few machines were still further out than the radius of the accelerator were quickly relocated. 

“All done,” Icarus said. “Save for the Borealis Block. It won’t move.”

“We will make do without, for now.”

Moving to the accelerator ring, Michael began building. Minutes passed, Icarus watching him intently, but he ran out of resources well before he could make any meaningful progress. 

He cursed. “I was inspired!”

“Always happens at the worst of times,” Icarus said. “I have no idea what you were doing, but if you need a lot of resources I know where you can find them. Do you remember when the space expanded, after you absorbed the Renegade’s magic? I think the expansion revealed a whole new asteroid belt or something. I have the coordinates.”

A blinking dot appeared in Michael's vision. He wasted no time, flying there with the artillery station in tow in case the asteroid had hostile creatures living on its surface like last time. Fortunately, his worry turned out to be unnecessary because when he got close enough for the asteroid to fully render, as it did, it was completely empty.

Gripping gold coins stolen from Travis’s Candle Light stash in the real world, Michael used their magic to quickly disassemble it into materials. It wasn’t efficient, but he could not afford to waste time and lose the inspiration.

Within minutes, he was back at the Aura Accelerator, followed by a cloud of materials trailing behind him.