The infinity dungeon 234

Chapter 234

Travis crossed his arms. “If your AI told you, why do you still want to double check with me?” he said.

“Are you still salty I plunged a hand into your guts, for the second time? Look, there was no blood this time.”

“A little, can you blame me?”

Michael sighed. “I guess not. Anyway, why are things spiraling out of control with the OA? I thought you had it handled, or did the Faith make you do stupid shit?”

“The faith energy was affecting me,” the man said. “But don't accuse me of incompetency. I walked up to the general demanding better conditions and when he said no, I threatened him. Told him that we have our hands everywhere, that we can get the government to shut him down. That we have the nuclear codes. You know what he did? He stared at me in the eye and said “do it”. He said fucking do it. He said that threats are empty unless you are willing to go through with them. I left feeling like a fool. Of course I’m not one to let these things slide. I took it personally. But so far, our political moves have been countered while all our other attempts have been met with force we cannot counter. Our Operators have all been defeated, some killed. I suspect, Michael, that they used Faith to deal with us.”

“I understand. It's time to get my hands dirty again,” Michael said. “Point me in the right direction.”

He realized, as he spoke the last sentence, that the last time he had said something similar involving an OA general, it had not ended well. This time, however, he knew what he was doing and what he was getting into. 

Later that night, Michael found himself staring at the OA’s base from afar. They had upgraded their defenses, and the shimmering shield was much more solid than before. It glowed to his magic sight with specks of gold, platinum and white.

“Faith and Intent?” he muttered. “Color me impressed.”

“Cute, but it won’t keep us out.” Icarus’s voice was syrupy. He was dangling his legs while lounging on his chair in the control room, analyzing the data Michael was gathering and cross-referencing it with satellite readings. “However they managed to upgrade the shield, they did it on their own because the Renegade was never here. He’s back in Rome now, it seems. Plus, he’s all out of Renegade energy. Your aura might be only made of mana for now, but you know how to manipulate Qi and Intent well enough. Did you bring enough coins?”

“I got a couple dozen golds,” Michael said. The coins were no longer just backup to refill his mana pool, but they also served to provide all the energies higher than mana, energies his inner space could not produce yet.

“A couple dozen is definitely overkill. You’ll be fine.”

“Let’s not get cocky. It cost us dearly, last time.”

“Fine,” Icarus cooed. “You would do well to remember that even though I look human, I'm a diffuse consciousness running trillions of calculations every second.”

Michael pretended not to hear. “Faith is the real problem. My only trump card against it is the spiral, and it’s even more damaging to me than Truth had been.”

Icarus hummed.

“Okay,” Michael said. “Give me the general’s location.”

A map appeared in his vision. The shield around the compound blocked the satellites from reading the magical signals, and a very suspicious electronic jamming prevented Icarus from hacking into the many devices inside the base, but they still had visuals. Extrapolating from the past few days of data, a few probable locations lit up on the map.

Michael vanished, burning magic from a gold coin to hide not only his mundane signature but also any more esoteric attempts at finding him. Compared to his control over mana, his ability to manipulate Qi and Intent were rudimentary at best, but they served the purpose.

He reappeared some distance from the shield, and then walked slowly toward the compound, adjusting his magical output as needed. In the inner space, the gold coin’s energies manifested as a thundercloud and a strange viscous liquid–Intent and Qi respectively–surrounded by a shield of mana and aura to keep them from falling into the black hole, and slowly diminishing as they got used.

“Halway there,” Michael announced.

“Satellites show no movement,” Icarus said. “But I wouldn’t trust the readings too much.”

Just as the AI said that, Michael felt something change. The hairs on his body stood up as something like static electricity filled the air. It tasted strange to his magical senses.

“A pulse of Faith energy,” he muttered. 

Instead of washing over him like it did with everything else, it stuck to him like glue.

“Shit,” he cursed under his breath, but he had prepared for the eventuality. 

Flaring the tiny spirals in the inner space’s boundary, he began to absorb the energy before it could relay the information back to the caster. A rain of sparks and golden flakes lit the empty void of the inner space as the energies outside dwindled and diminished.

The Faith energy seemed to react to this, changing its shape, trying to escape the pulling of the spirals to run back toward the OA’s base. It was slowly detaching itself from Michael, who struggled but could not find any purchase on it. It was too slippery.

“Well then,” he said, finally flaring the central spiral. 

He only did so for the briefest of moments, but a wave of gravity and vertigo swept through the inner space nonetheless. It reached the boundary, crossed it, and latched onto the Faith energy being offered to it like a tasty morsel before a shark.

It vanished down the spiral’s gullet, the wave of gravity retreating inside the black hole faster than Michael’s perception could follow.

“You’re undetected, congrats.” Icarus said. “It only cost you some more damage to the structures and the boundary. I’m running out of materials again.”

Michael ignored the whining AI and proceeded toward the base. He knew that to get in, he would have to use the spiral again on it, and wasn’t looking forward to that moment at all. The smaller spirals had sadly not been enough to deal with even just a passive Faith scan, they would be too weak to work on the shield.

As he reached it, Michael coated his hand with magic and slashed. The spiral flared, following his movement and carving a whole section of the shield as it passed through. The energies simply vanished, leaving behind frayed edges that struggled to close back up, allowing Michael to slip inside.

“They have detected the breach,” Icarus announced. 

Michael nodded. It was part of the plan. He focused on the Aura Accelerator, and expanded the edges of his aura in the real world. He burned another gold coin, topping off his mana and letting the other energies fall in the black hole.

“I’m in their systems,” Icarus said. “The general, I know where he is. Underground office 8-B.”

Michael’s face twisted into a wicked smile. He readied a teleport, feeling the mana cost increase due to the target location being mostly unknown and due to whatever magical protections the OA had put in place. In the last month, they had advanced their knowledge of magic by leaps and bounds, and the whole place reeked of Faith. It was not enough to stop him, though. He simply burned a gold coin and allowed the tyranny of superior power to smash through all the defenses.

“Hello general,” he said as he appeared in the room. 

The general did not look too surprised to see him. 

Of course he doesn’t, Michael thought. Cocky little bastard.

The two men seized each other up.

“I was expecting a visit,” the man said, rising from his chair and letting it drag across the concrete floor. “You can’t kill me.”

“Bold of you to assume that’s the extent of what I want to do to you.” Michael said, walking around the desk filled with paperwork. Some things never changed, it seemed. As he layered magic on the walls all around, he talked. “Pray tell, why wouldn’t I be able to kill you, should I decide to?”

The general scoffed. “The Technomancer is watching. The moment you kill me the whole world will know—”

“Nothing.” Michael interrupted him before he could start his soliloquy. “They will know nothing. The technomancer is currently engaged in a battle of wills against an AI with clearly superior capabilities, and is losing. Do you have other protections, or was it just the one?”