The infinity dungeon 238

Chapter 238

The storm boiled above Michael's head like a pot of stew on a too-hot fire, spilling all its contents down on the forests below. The rain had been picking up for a while, plunging the mountains and valleys in eerie wet mists. The trees and the soil were completely soaked, and the ground was no longer able to accept the water falling down from the sky. It crashed down in impetuous rivers, carrying mud and stones, flooding the winding roads and threatening the houses on the hillside slopes.

The houses in the flatlands between the mountains weren’t faring much better, and more than one family was loading up their trucks to go somewhere else, somewhere safer. Others were choosing to remain, perhaps because they had nowhere else to go, perhaps because they didn’t wish to abandon their homes.

Michael had not yet taken to the skies when a nearby cloud charged up, its tip like a talon of a great beast hidden by the mists, piercing the layer of soft water droplets from above. It lit up, rumbling twice before exploding with a magically empowered lightning strike reaching down at the earth.

When it hit a tree, it exploded in a great boom of splinters and steam. From the charred remains, energy wafted up and coalesced into an abomination of wood and leaves. Michael had smitten it before it could take its first lumbering steps, scattering the magic and returning the materials to the forest.

The storm roared and sent down another bolt of lightning. It changed direction midway, turning sharply toward Michael. He punched at it, spiral flaring, and the energy traveled up his arm to his elbow before it was fully absorbed. In the inner space, a shower of blue electrical sparks rained from the boundary, the electricity seeking anything to ground itself and finding the many machines there with their sweet metal.

Most of the sparks were too far from the machines to reach them and fell harmlessly into the black hole. A few of them however threatened to wreak havoc in the delicate structures and systems that were still unshielded after the recent round of changes that had resulted in the Aura Accelerator being built.

Michael carefully guided the energies away from his stuff, up and down, away from the plane of the ecliptic where the accelerator rested so that they could also fall into the black hole. He was sweating, struggling to control so many tiny pinpricks of energy, but he had spared the machines from yet another round of damage and repair.

Then he took to the sky, angering the storm which responded with more bolts attempting to strike him from all directions. There was Renegade Energy in them, faint but present, growing like the other energies of the storm due to the sheer size of it fueling the birth of more magic.

It was trickier to deal with compared to the other energies. It was impossible to control at Michael's current level of power, and he could only let it pass through the inner space toward the black hole, a straight path down from wherever it had appeared on the boundary’s surface.

“Johanne says to keep the storm occupied,” Icarus’s voice was a whisper in his ears. “She’s coming with a device that should work as some sort of lightning rod.”

Michael’s jaw clenched in pain as more lightning struck him. The energies lashed out, most of them under control save for the Renegade Energy that tore at his already damaged boundary then zipped down the black hole’s gravity well and damaged everything in its path.

One stray bolt struck at the Aura Accelerator, punching a hole through the ring. Debris exploded from the point of impact, scattering everywhere in the vacuum of the strange space. The light of the black hole’s accretion disk was deep orange, reflected on the metallic scrap that spun away from the impact point.

Michael’s aura flickered, like a candle in the wind.

“Fuck,” he cursed.

He manually grabbed the focusing crystals scattered around the Accelerator, realigning them to bypass the damaged section. As he did so, Icarus was drawing deep from the batteries, using the mana to intercept the flying shrapnel and patch the hole.

“We are running low on materials,” he said.

Michael grunted, taking another hit. Below, he saw Johanne running around the Site while carrying several metal rods thicker than the trees around her. When she reached a certain location, she dumped them on the ground and started digging with magic.

A lightning bolt charged up, aimed at her. Michael moved to intercept, took the hit and watched the boundary fray even further. He could see the nothingness beyond, like the murky water of a churning lake. He thought he could see something there, waiting in the nothing, and he remembered when the last expansion of his inner space had supposedly brought stuff from… somewhere, and had included it in its outer reaches.

Perhaps the void outside was not so empty after all.

The storm was angry. This last bolt was chock-full of Renegade Energy, and it ripped through Michael's inner space. As it did, Michael could also feel the storm weakening all around as it spent its gathered energy.

“I have to keep doing this,” he realized. “I must rid the storm of Renegade Energy before the Renegade himself realizes he can replenish his stock here.”

Then Johanne was done, and she was running toward another hilltop with her oversized rods in tow. As Michael moved to shield her, he saw that behind him the rod she had planted was drawing all the lightning to itself. 

Each strike obliterated the forest nearby, until the hilltop was completely barren of trees, but the thick rain kept any fire from spreading. The energy that hit the rod vanished underground, where the runescript for the shield still ran in hidden tunnels hundreds of feet below.

“She’s feeding me energy,” Icarus said with no little amount of surprise. “That woman is crazy. Crazy genius.”

As she planted the second, then third rod, Michael was approaching the breaking point. His inner space was accumulating damage, and the boundary was like a torn-up old cloth, broken in more places than it was whole.

But the storm was weakening, the sky growing brighter.

“We are going to have a big problem if the Renegade suddenly decides to show up and realizes that you just overused your spiral and can’t use it again, Michael.” Icarus said.

“Shut up.”

“As you wish.”

Below him, Johanne planted another rod and one last, angry lightning bolt struck it. The rod exploded with power, throwing Johanne back so hard Michael had to intervene before she turned to paste against a rock face. Almost out of mana, he drew from the environment, sucking in the wild energies that felt like licking a battery but did the job nonetheless.

Then it was all quiet. The rain fell softly on the wet forest, the sky of a single shade of light grey like a curtain hiding the sun. The lightning rod hissed whenever a drop of rain touched the red-hot metal slowly cooling down.

Michael set Johanne on the ground, creating a dome of protection from the rain and drying the ground with the last of his mana. She was breathing, but unconscious.

The explosion had thrown her magic in disarray, sending her into a coma. Michael closed his eyes, feeling for her magic.

“Are you sure you know what you are doing?” Icarus asked from the sidelines. He had appeared, holographic form walking around the dome, peeking down at the prone form of Michael and Johanne on the ground.

“I don’t,” Michael muttered. He moved some things around, eyes still closed, his full focus trained on the feeling of it. “But when something’s out of place, it feels wrong. I move it until it… it feels like it snaps into place.”

Icarus hummed. “Fascinating. You know you’re probably the only one on Earth who can do that, right? And I'm not talking right now. Probably ever.”

Michael shrugged and kept working. Johanne’s breath was labored, but no longer erratic. Some color was returning to her face.

“Travis is rather happy you got the storm to a manageable level. I told him it’s not permanent, of course.”

“Not now,” Michael said as he tried not to get distracted, although perhaps he needn’t try too hard. It was like he was doing things on autopilot, fixing Johanne’s magic like an expert woodworker carving wood while having a conversation.

“Were you talking with him?” he asked in the end, curiosity taking over.

Icarus hummed yes.

“Dont manipulate the man too hard.”

“I’m not manipulating Travis,” Icarus said with a sheepish frown. “You could say I'm… enabling him. You can say that I’m an enabler, if you wish to call me bad names, but don’t say I'm being manipulative.”

“Icarus, by virtue of continuous monitoring of more than eight billion humans interacting constantly, not to speak of all your little social experiments, not to mention the fact that you have total control over what your holograms do and how they look, not to mention the disproportionate intelligence gap between you and everyone else… Whenever you talk to someone, it’s nothing short of mind magic what you can do to them. And mind magic is where I draw the line.”

Icarus whined. “It would be all much easier if I could just manipulate everybody into doing what’s best for them.”

“For us, you mean? Or for you?”

Icarus shrugged. “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?”

“I like that fierce loyalty that you have but no, it’s not necessarily the same thing.”

Icarus sighed.

“Besides,” Michael added. “I’d end up with what, a world of domesticated ants? I don’t want that.”

“I get it, I get it.”

Michael smiled. “You don’t, do you?”

“I don’t, but I respect your wishes. You know it’s all I care about, you and your desires… just know that if you change your mind, all you need to do is say the word, and it will all be so much easier.”

Michael swallowed. The sweetness in Icarus’s voice as he offered him a deal with the devil had been almost intoxicating.