The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

David glared at Michael, and there was a dangerous look in his eyes. "What do you mean you can't heal her?"

"There's nothing wrong with her body as far as my healing skill is concerned," Michael explained. "And at Rare-rank, I still haven't found anything it could not heal."

"Fuck it," cried David, "I'm taking her back into the dungeon."

Michael hurried behind the towering man, who was running towards the dungeon at full speed, faster than a car. "Wait! What do you mean back in there?"

"She was fine before we took her out," David said as he ran, "then we took her to the surface, and she's been getting weaker and weaker. I thought it was the trauma, but clearly that wasn't it."

They reached the entrance to the dungeon in record time. Inside, they pulverized the goblins of Floor 1 with ease, David's hurry making short work even of the boss monsters, his stone magic devastating when coupled with his physical strength. Liff was slung on his shoulder, unconscious, forcing him to fight with only one arm while protecting her. It didn't even slow him down, and soon they were back in the desolate steppes of Floor 2.

Last time Michael had been here, he had been alone and he had stolen something from the underground laboratory.

Crossing the desolate plains didn't take long at all. The village, the pivot point of Project Landfall and the strange experiment at the center of this floor's theme, was waiting for them. It was full of monsters and mutated creatures, wolves that had changed beyond their original nature into something even more alien, more removed from the world of living and part of the world of nightmares.

Michael cleared the village with his magic in seconds, without asking for David's help so that he could focus on carrying Liff and making sure she wasn't harmed. She was burning, a bundle of shivering skin and bones. She had been barely recovering from her trauma and the starvation she suffered during her stay in the village, alone and scared, and now this had happened.

Monster after monster was pulverized as they tried to stand in their way. Michael's [Telekinesis] leveled up to level 2 in the process as he used its raw magic—of Rare tier and laced with Intent—to shove a whole wave of monsters to the side. The duo barreled through the few bodies left behind in their mad dash towards the village.

"There!" David pointed at the sole two-story house there, "that's where I found her."

Michael summoned more magic. With a snap of his fingers, [Candle Light] flames merged together with Forgefire and leapt at the wolves, meeting them in their own mad dash. The magical skill directed the Elemental fire, fire commanding fire, making sure the only thing that burned were the monsters and not the houses or even the dry grasses on the ground.

[Candle Light] reaches level 5!

Michael didn't even acknowledge the broken system's announcement. He knew that the skill had been on the cusp for a while, and this novel use had simply pushed it beyond the threshold. A wave of fire, like a torrential tide but made of living flames, washed the whole village. For a moment, the purple twilight of the plains was replaced by roaring oranges and yellows, with tinges of red. In the fire's wake, monsters were made into small mounds of ash.

"Thank you, Michael," said David, kicking the door open. The rotten wood splintered under the tremendous strength of the kick, but the man didn't care and rushed to the second story.

There, Michael saw a half-made bed. Barely more than rags on the ground, on a deflated mattress that had been fixed with old clothes and dry leaves. David set Liff down on it, making sure she was comfortable and warm under the blankets.

"She's not getting better," he said after a few minutes. In the distance, through the window, Michael could see dark shapes moving about at the foot of the hills. Trampling the dry grass. Making strange noises.

"More monsters are coming," he muttered.

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"You can deal with them, right?"

Michael nodded, "of course. I wonder, though. Is this the right place to be?"

"What do you mean?"

"The lab," he said, "they must have done something to her there."

David thought about it as he paced around the room. The way his eyes darted to Liff every few moments betrayed his real focus, and he massaged his head and the bridge of his nose in an attempt to focus. "I thought it might have been the dungeon," he said in the end.

Michael shook his head, "none of the other dungeon people suffer from this sort of effect. Drullkrin might; his mana pool dries up when he's outside an Area of Influence. Johanne's doesn't. Either way, Liff doesn't even have a mana pool. She's Iron rank."

"Perhaps she does and you just don't see well enough," David shot back.

Michael was about to retort, but then he saw the expression on the man's face. He realized that he was about to start a fight with David, of all people, right when David needed him level headed the most. He kept a lid on his aggression and anger, sighing loudly.

"Maybe. I still think we should go to the underground facility. The whole Landfall program business sounds shady to me, and we never really took the time to study it well."

Hours passed. The two men were slumped each to one side of the room, propped against the old splintered wood.

"W-where are we? David?" a small voice broke the silence.

They turned around, and in the middle of the bundle of sheets they saw Liff struggling to stand up. David rushed to her as Michael watched without moving a finger.

"Liff? Are you alright?" David asked frantically, before turning to Michael. "Don't stand there like that! How is she?"

Michael frowned, "I'm not standing here doing nothing, man. I scanned her. Like I told you before, I don't see anything out of the ordinary with her."

"Well, there must be," David was confrontational, "she's awake now. She wasn't before."

"Clearly." Michael said, shaking his head. "Stay with her. Keep her monitored. I'll sweep the village, look for some clues."

There was a strange coldness to the air outside, and as Michael walked around the village, it only seemed to increase. He amped up his protective shield, isolating himself from the strange environment of David's version of the second floor of the dungeon. The air inside the shield was still the same stale, damp air as outside of it, but there was no wind buffeting Michael's face anymore. Sadly, he could do nothing to dampen its howls as it passed through old buildings, or to isolate the sound of the rattling chains and the bell close to the central water well. His control wasn't that good, not yet.

The walk cleared his head a bit. He had been about to snap at David, but now he felt more patient and understanding. The man wasn't really blaming him; he was simply grasping at straws, at anything that could explain Liff's strange illness. That wasn't to say that David wasn't going to get a good talking-to, of course. Like with Travis, Michael was slowly learning the necessity of boundaries with the people of power that always surrounded him.

There was a time when those people were his friends, and another time and context when they were true power brokers playing with the fate of the world—and they should be treated as such.

Michael's wanderings took him all the way to the outskirts of the village. It really was nothing more than a collection of old, empty wooden houses and abandoned farming equipment surrounded by bare hills under a purple raging sky. There was dust in the air, as well as pieces of dead grass that had been ripped out of the wet ground by the gusts.

The howls of wind were strange out here, Michael thought.

He squinted. He thought he could see something, but his shield was flickering where the debris hit it. He created a small hole in it with his magic manipulation, pushing it to level 5 and quickly dismissing the intrusive message. He had felt the level-up coming and didn't need a reminder from the buggy system.

Now focusing on the distant horizon, he realized that the howls were coming from a specific direction, right where he could somehow make out dark shapes moving about. They were moving towards him, but it would take a while before they got in range.

He was about to investigate when he heard his name yelled from a distance, carried by the wind. He could make it out only thanks to his headache-inducing senses enhanced by the Mind Dantian. Restoring the shield, he broke into a run, reaching the house and bursting through the battered door and into the room.

"She's fainted again, Michael," David said. He was shaking his head, hands waving, "I don't know what we did wrong but… why? Why this? She was getting better!"

"I don't know," Michael said, "but the position is no longer safe. I saw a great gathering of monsters outside. We can probably fend them off when they come, but from your narrations of the events down here they seem to act like a swarm, and the dungeon doesn't really like indecisive people."

"One of them might get a little help and slip past us, yeah," David agreed, getting up and pacing around the room. Now he was no longer panicking; he was thinking. "You were right. We need to move to the underground lab. Liff was mumbling something earlier, I think I heard the word 'witch'."

"Let's go. The position is more defensible, and perhaps we might find some answers in the AI and the researchers' files."