The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

Michael let himself be led into the underground structure by the voice. Even after the Gemstone grew too far for a normal voice to reach where he was, he kept hearing the voice as if it was coming from there.

He kept his guard high. Something wasn't adding up. For starters, the voice had first claimed not to know anything about Guardians, only to immediately say that it knew who was eating Michael's spirits. It was the perfect lure, and the voice sounded clueless enough to make an even more clueless adventurer lower their guard.

Thinking about the dungeon, this was clearly a standard floor with a little twist and not a full fledged custom challenge. It was just too easy compared to his previous experiences, where both Floor 2 and Floor 4 had immediately posed a level of danger and challenge much greater than this. Perhaps the real threat would come later, he thought, and indeed he was walking into a potential devil's lair–hence why he kept his guard high and the shield powered to the maximum around him. Or perhaps the dungeon simply didn't have the resources to spit out custom challenges left and right. Perhaps it limited those special challenges to even-numbered floors, or perhaps it was up to random chance.

The voice's instructions finally led him to an underground chamber. It was a huge room, with walls made of gigantic ornate stones and a pyramid-shaped ceiling. The pyramid was truncated at the top, where a small hole let the light of the sun shine into the room as a shaft of solid light. A few vines dangled down the hole, their tips a bright green.

"So you don't want the Gnapticon stone?"

Michael turned around towards the new source of the same voice that had guided him here. His movements were slow and controlled, betraying nothing. He had to look down a fair bit, where his eyes met a hooded figure, glowing eyes peeking out of purple fabric while the rest of the face, body and features were completely hidden. From conventional sight, at least.

"No," Michael said, "how many times do I have to tell you? I have no interest in that thing."

He pointed at a small, round object in the goblin's hands. While it looked completely mundane to normal sight, under magical sight it glowed with a powerful Force element signature.

The goblin recoiled, arms retracting further into the fabric as if to hide the small stone from view without much success.

"Just making sure," he said with quick, hurried words and a scoff. "Come."

Michael was led to a great stone statue at the center of the room. Last time he had looked at it, the shaft of light was coming at an angle, but now the light coming from above was perfectly vertical. It wasn't even close to midday outside, Michael thought, nor had he detected any strange shenanigan happening between a few seconds ago when the light was still at an angle and now.

Where the light hit, it highlighted the central statue's impressive craftsmanship while also shedding light into its state of disrepair. Moss was growing out of holes and cracks in its surface, and water dripped down its arms and sharp sculpted clothing.

Perched on top of the statue, on a golden circlet much brighter than the murky marble of the rest of the body, was a small bird. It looked primeval, scales and leathery skin, except it was not made of organic matter but of the same stone as the statue, with hints and accents of gold like that of the circlet. It was perfectly still, almost a part of the room's decoration.

Except, "that bird is not part of the statue," Michael said. As soon as he said so, the bird jerked a little, almost imperceptibly if not for Michael's stats granting him superhuman sight.

He wondered, for a moment, what even higher stats and unlocking other dantian cores and leveling them up would let him see. If this was baseline–

The goblin looked like he wanted to say something, but before he could speak, the small bird suddenly animated. It flapped its stone wings, the material demonstrating much more flexibility than its looks suggested, and the power behind the movement was great enough to send a gale of wind through the room and upset water, dust and debris all around Michael.

"It's just a chick…" Michael heard the goblin mutter. His voice was muffled, distant.

Looking around, a shimmering wall of magic separated the room into two halves, cutting Michael's escape route. This was no surprise. Michael had sensed the moment the goblin activated his Gnapticon stone and raised a wall of solid Force element between him and Michael, locking the human in the deep half of the room together with the statue and the so-called chick.

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Heeding the bird no mind, Michael turned around.

"Is that what the Gnapticon stone does?" he said. Now that he was looking at it directly with Magic Sense rather than just sensing it from behind, the intricacies of the Stone and its working were revealed.

"I knew it!" the goblin said defensively, "you were after the Stone after all!"

Michael frowned. "You used it against me! How dare you insinuate I'm not a man of my word."

He was working himself up as he spoke, but then a sudden impact rocked his shield slightly. Feeling the draw on Qi overcome his natural regeneration for a moment, Michael sighed and shook his head.

"Let's put an end to this pathetic farce. You want to make me feel like I'm the villain? Well, let me show you what I can do."

Qi and Intent gathered around his fist, held together by his Aura. He backhanded the Force wall, the first impact cracking it–white spiderweb threads spreading across the whole pane of force in less than a second–and the second punch shattered it with a sound of breaking glass. Wind picked up as the atmospheric pressure differential created by the severance of half the room was suddenly released.

Walking towards the goblin, Michael broke pane after pane of hastily erected elemental Force walls cast with increasing panic. The goblin walked backwards, small hurried steps, then stumbled on his own robes and fell ass first to the ground, whimpering.

"Pathetic. I show you proper magical Tier tyranny and you fold like this!"

But then the goblin's body language changed from panic and fear to arrogance. Michael barely had the time to turn around before his shield went yellow and a loud roar shook the room.

He stopped moving, restoring his shield to green and then transparent glass appearance. Up above, the chick was nowhere to be seen, instead replaced by a much bigger and meaner bird.

"The mother!" cried out the goblin. His voice was once again muffled.

The mother bird, black as the night even under the light of the sun, roared again. This time the sound was so strong that parts of the walls and ceiling began to rattle and fall down. Projectiles of stone bigger than a car fell down, some impacting Michael's shield, others exploding and thrusting the room in a shroud of dust and darkness. The goblin, on the other side of the Force wall, was unharmed and breathing clean air.

So was Michael, the dust unable to penetrate his shield without his explicit permission. The mother bird, seeing this, blurred and disappeared.

"Found the asshole eating all my spirits," he muttered. The mother bird reappeared inches away from the shield. Michael stood still, shield at the ready. Then the impact. His shield went red, but he didn't pay it any mind. Instead, he thrust a hand forward and gripped the bird's beak with his hands.

"Want to see–" he began to say, but then the bird roared again and transformed into a blur, escaping his grip.

Michael felt his neck muscles contract in painful anger. He looked around, scanning the room with his senses as he spun around in circles. More stones fell around him, this time lightly unfused with magic so that the dust they raised was like fog to his senses. He took a step, shield weakening for a moment and then returning to full strength. Then another, waiting for the moment the mother bird decided to dive a second time.

No such attack came for several seconds. Michael felt the red-hot roar of the flames of anger stoke in his heart.

"You know what?" he snapped, "I don't have all day to wait for this." He turned towards the goblin, "you and your stupid stone. Let me show you a proper use of the Elements."

Michael took a stance. Arms wide, twin snakes of Forgefire and Hycean Ice shot to the air from behind him. He ordered the two elements to detonate, turning their interactions violent. Instead of interacting peacefully, their opposite nature mediated by his power, he let them run wild, allowing them to fight each other as they would normally do.

They quickly plunged his isolated half of the room into chaos. The dark blur that was the mother bird appeared here and there, moving faster and faster in a panicked attempt at escaping the destruction, but Michael was relentless. Second after second, the volume of the room was filled with either fire or ice–or the explosive meeting of the two. Water vapor saturated the air, incandescent and frigid at the same time. The steam explosions were violent enough to rock the walls of the underground temple, and soon screams filled the air.

That they could be heard at all over the cacophony of the two antithetical elements was a testament to the bird's suffering. They echoed strangely, then the sound became suddenly distant and disappeared.

Michael kept the destruction going for several more seconds, then cut power to the elements while asking them to behave nicely once again. As the room was plunged into darkness—the only light being the slowly fading orange of Michael's shield and the light from the torches on the other side of the Force shield—only devastation was left.

Michael looked around and down, taking it all in. He walked among the ruins of the temple, the Force shield acting as a stark barrier between destruction and chaos, and weathered order of the intact side of the room, where moss still grew on stones dimly lit by the flickering torches.

He was about to address the goblin when he suddenly focused his attention elsewhere like a laser, and a torrent of energies shot out again from his outstretched hand right as the dark blur escaped the temple through the hole at the top, faster than the energies could reach it.

Then a rumble followed, this time coming from the gigantic stone statue. A high pitched, shrill cry came from its general direction, weaker than the mother bird's but also much more annoying. Michael knew where it was coming from: the little chick, perched on top of the great statue. Its cry was like an activation sequence starting, and the statue's gold circlet shone with light before the whole behemoth began to move.