The infinity dungeon 229

Chapter 229

The expansion was like an earthquake, a shockwave of power radiating from the center of the inner space. It pushed against the boundary, stretching it, tearing it apart. Beyond the boundary was… nothing.

Michael could see the nothingness through the tears. It had the same effect on his mind as the empty space he saw from the Seedship when the old elf had turned its wall transparent. Same in flavor, except a million times stronger in intensity. If that had been fear, primal, visceral fear, this was full panic. 

The emptiness was not a void. It was not… anything. By all means, it should not be possible to even behold it. There was nothing to behold. There should not be any threat from it, for it was not a thing. In fact, it should be impossible to even go there, because there was no there.

Michael suddenly had the urge to stick a hand through a tear and test the theory for himself. The thought lasted a fraction of a second, then vanished, leaving behind pure unadulterated horror.

Like the call of the void, the little voice that says “jump” when you are at the top of a cliff. 

It filled him with dread. Even though the space was being pushed out, the void was everywhere and nowhere. It lacked the flavor of existence, space and time meaningless beyond the frayed boundary of the inner space.

Where the inner space ended, Michael realized, nothingness did not begin. It could not, because there was nothing and nothing had no extension in space. The boundary was not being pushed into something, it was not pushing anything away. It was expanding, the microcosm of existence slowly increasing in size. And that was that.

Michael was forced to tear his eyes away from the terrifying sight of nothing when Icarus’s concerned voice reached his ears.

“The Borealis Block is moving,” the AI said.

Flying toward it, Michael saw that it was not the block that was moving, rather it was the boundary that was expanding past it. Looking out through the tears, however, he saw no other side. No portion of the block still outside the inner space. It was as if the block of ice was materializing in real time, the boundary printing it into existence rather than letting more of its bulk through.

The sight was enough to make Michael's hair raise. If not from outside the reaches of the boundary, then where was the block coming from? He tried to get a better look but he recoiled, his brain as if struck by physical force.

“I really don’t like this,” he muttered. Everywhere he looked, the gaping holes in the boundary revealed more of the same terrifying nothingness. It was not black, it was not anything.

“We have to fix this,” he said. 

The block soared above him. Huge, so big it was hard to fathom, its bulk had been freed from the clutches of the torn boundary and had been ensnared in the black hole’s gravity well. Cursing, Michael snatched some materials from his dwindling stash, scattered all over the inner space after the shockwaves had pushed them away from their orbit, and used them to build a scaffolding and a fusion engine for the block. As it ignited, it gently pushed the block into orbit, close to the edges of the space, no longer falling.

Michael sighed in relief, but dared not look at his handiwork. The gaps in the boundary were all too close, with the terrifying sight of the outside that did not exist. Truth, back when he had it, had been much more gentle than this. It simply destroyed his body and mind with violence, like a blender of broken glass shards.

The void was a million times worse. It was insidious, paralyzing. It was cosmic horror, the fright of not knowing what the hell was the non-thing that stood in wait just outside the boundary. What if it spilled in? Could it even do that? 

Luckily, the boundary was slowly repairing itself. Some tears and gashes were already closing, the ones smaller than a pinky at least. The others, they were shrinking, but it was a slow process.

Michael looked at the rest of the inner space. There was plenty of damage, plenty to focus on that would distract him from the state of the boundary.

“Michael, you can deal with all this later,” Icarus said. “I can begin gathering the scattered materials for some of the more urgent repairs.”

“You can?”

Icarus’s hand glowed with mana, and Michael felt a small drain on his batteries. 

“Cool, isn’t it?” the AI said with a big smile on his face. “My control is limited, but I should get better with practice.”

“Since when?”

“The hologram, I think, but it was the terror of the shockwave that made me discover I could do this. I tried to defend myself, since you were busy and did not even think about poor little Icarus, and I discovered that I could. Now I'm even more deeply connected to you.”

The sorry state of the inner space looked like the aftermath of a hurricane. The Aura ring was riddled with holes, most of the lenses were chipped and cracked, and several batteries were leaking mana in streams that slowly descended down into the spiral, feeding the greedy giant. But it was the Mark-II solar collector that had been damaged the most, being the machine with the bigger surface area exposed to the black hole’s shockwave.

Parts of it had been torn apart, and the debris had been flung all over the inner space. They had joined the disordered mass of materials Michael had stashed away for future construction, becoming a cloud of debris that glittered like tiny snowflakes. They were literally everywhere.

Yet, Icarus was right. The crisis had passed. The young man’s face was fixed in concentration as he directed Michael’s magic to restore order to chaos. Some debris began to glow, and were gently directed toward a staging area, sorted, and then used to fix the damage. It was going to take a while, at least until Michael could come back and help with his total control of magic, but the situation was no longer deteriorating: it was stable and improving.

With a nod to Icarus, Michael returned to the material world.

“Thanks for waiting,” he said to the other two. He stood up, noticing the blood staining his clothes and the marble edges of the table he had slumped on.

A wave of his hands, and it was all gone. Michael watched the mana tick back up, then down, then up again as Icarus used it in the inner space and to repair the collectors. 

Travis, who had been pacing around the room, stopped and studied Michael's face.

“Care to explain what just happened?” he asked, ending the long moment of silence.

Behind him, David was sitting on a sofa, arms crossed. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, pursed lips and narrowed eyes.

“Lots of things happened,” Michael said with a shrug. 

Even the simple action of trying to construct a coherent narrative to retell the recent events made him think about the void beyond the inner space’s boundary. He froze.

“Michael?” David got up from his seat, lowering his center of mass as if preparing for a fight.

Travis too felt the change in the air. Michael’s aura was not yet back to full, the ring still quite damaged, but together with the mana Michael had unconsciously seized from the air the effect had been quite enough to set the other two on edge. They felt that something was not right. They felt the latent power gathering.

Then, with a deep breath, Michael released the grip on the surrounding magic. His aura eased up.

Travis’s bulging arms relaxed. David let go of a breath he was holding.

“I’m sorry folks. For the disturbance I caused,” he said casually. His mind was in disarray, but it was if he had broken through the threshold for emotional stability and the very same void beyond the boundary had replaced his storm of emotions. The very same void that had made him freeze in his tracks when he realized that he could not even recall how it had looked. He could only recall the horror of looking at it. But at what? It was like his own memory had a void now, and the harder he tried to think about it, the more lost he felt.

So lost that he had once again unconsciously frozen all the magic in the air around him. No, he had frozen the very air, a reaction to his rising panic.

He let go once again, and the other two people in the room could breathe once more.

A rush of magic. Michael turned, ready to smite the intruder, then aborted the action when he sensed that it was Johanne. She stepped out of a short-lived portal, a window into another room that collapsed behind her.

Michael stopped her from speaking with a raised finger. “Me first,” he said while her mouth still hung open.

Behind him, Travis snorted. “Yes, you first. Perhaps you should explain–”

Michael was on him in the blink of an eye. By all means, he should have been weaker than Travis. He should have been weaker than David too. The two had delved into the dungeon a lot while Michael had been incapacitated. They wielded Qi, and some Intent, plus their respective elements. They had grown by leaps and bounds.

They now stood at what should be an equal if not higher level of power. Their auras were True, while Michael's was only mana. 

And yet, he was on Travis in moments, before the man could even begin to react. His hand shot forward, piercing Travis’s aura with the glow of a million tiny spirals, different yet similar to the gigantic one he had summoned to deal with the renegade.

It was not just the spirals that allowed Michael to win before the fight even began. It was mastery. His control over mana was near absolute, and he could do things with it that the other two could only dream of.

His hand plunged into Travis’s stomach, sinking deep into his flesh. There was no blood. Travis felt no pain, just a sensation of numbness and cold that propagated through him. He looked at Michael with his mouth agape, wheezing a single unintelligible word.