The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

The airport runway sped past them as the plane accelerated and took flight. The moment of turbulence that followed lasted for longer than usual, and the passengers reacted to it in the usual fashion of a crowd: panic.

Michael stared lazily out the window, thinking about the long flight ahead. He had plans on how to spend the time, but even then it still felt like wasted time when he could do the same amount of work in the Dungeon with only a handful of minutes passing in the real world. The crowd quieted and then someone cheered when they cleared the lower layers of the atmosphere and the plane reached cruise altitude. They were loud enough to bother Michael, and he scoffed as he turned to Travis.

"People, am I right?"

The man was also pensive. He blinked, his mind getting back up to speed, "Do you think I'd survive the plane crashing?"

Michael thought about it for a moment or two. Icarus gave his own input in the form of a system-like window only Michael could see, but he wanted to think about it with his own brain first.

"I don't think so," he said in the end, "not if we are talking about an actual crash."

"What gives?" Travis asked. "Am I not True Silver just like you?"

"Sure, but can you control Aura well enough to nullify the impact? Did you strengthen your body to the point it doesn't even matter? Did you train your Fire until manipulating it became second nature to you, so that when the fuel explodes and this whole plane turns into a fiery inferno, the flames will barely even register as a warm breeze?"

"It's never easy, is it? What about you?"

Right on cue, Icarus provided several hundred escape plans from the catastrophic scenario. Instead of focusing on them, Michael studied Travis' face in search of something. Truth rang, and his Mind Dantian enhanced by his stats seemed to be onto something. He would not have found it before awakening his Soul Dantian, however, naïve as he was. Now it was clear as day.

Travis was trying to assess their relative levels of power, trying to find a scenario where they were equals, where they both found themselves in deep shit rather than just one of them. The funny thing was that the man wasn't doing it on purpose; it was his nature. David had seen through it back when he was old, although recently—and especially after his rejuvenation—the awareness of the fact didn't seem to be enough to prevent him from taking the bait.

"Piece of cake," Michael said. "With Telekinesis, I'm not saying that I can fly but I sure as hell am close. If the plane nosedives, I'll just get out and Feather Fall; if it explodes in the air, I'll just nullify the explosion with Aura, Telekinesis, and Fire and then get out."

Travis hummed, "and a million other ways." He smiled, "What? I could see the gears turning. You thought for long enough that, with your stats, you must have thought up at least a dozen plans."

Again, Michael's new awareness of things allowed him to gauge Travis' motives. The man was probing his capabilities, and at the same time he was trying to confirm his own assessment about Michael's mental abilities. He indulged him with a nod, turning towards the window. The hull of the plane and the double glass felt solid, but he knew that he could tear through them like paper.

Thinking about Travis, after his recent bouts in the Dungeon he found that this kind of behavior did not aggravate him anymore—he found it amusing. When it was Travis who did it, at least. Perhaps the man had assumed the status of a puppy in Michael's eyes.

Then his expression turned serious. With a snap of his aura and skills, all of which had been reinstated after his discovery that sundering weakened them permanently, he created a cocoon that blocked all sound and made people quite disinterested in learning what they were talking about should they gaze upon them.

Then, a small Light Stone connected to Icarus created a hologram of the globe filled with dots.

"I got your ping the other day. I took the time to study what you sent me, but I want to hear it from you. Is this what I think it is?"

The man nodded gravely, "It is. Yellow dots indicate all cases of suspected paranormal activity. Data from CCTV cameras, social media, phone cameras, microphones, satellites, everything. They are not equipped to detect magic, of course, so many of them could be false positives. We are talking about everything from people doing parlor tricks on camera for social media points to people vanishing on grainy surveillance camera footage, their phone GPS suddenly gone only to reappear somewhere else."

He pursed his lips. "At least, all fake images and videos online are generated by Icarus nowadays; there are no other AI image or video generators except the open-source ones. Even then, Icarus monitors every device, so we know for a fact that these things are as real as they can be."

"Good distraction, the AI videos," said Michael. "People see a strange video and can yell 'AI' at it, and keep living like before. The red dots?"

"Greater than 95% confidence that it's magic. Keep in mind that most of them are very minor instances, but not all of them. Notice how they are all clustered around Italy? The event we are trying to track is not on the map, but even if we don't find it these dots are worrying enough to warrant investigation."

Michael nodded.

"Let me ask you something. I know you were doing… things, in the Dungeon these days. Any chance you had the time to look into the shield tech? Johanne isn't being fast enough."

Michael laughed, "You want everything and you want it now, don't you?"

Travis wasn't amused. "Shields could save operators' lives. Of course I want them."

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"That's not all. Truth is ringing. Spit it out."

The man ground his teeth. "Those red dot concentrations," he growled, "there are other Dungeons or at least other sources of magic scattered around. I don't like it. Each and every single one of them is not only a threat to the world, but to us as well! Candle Light, no—Unity cannot allow magic to run rampant until we are ready."

"As I thought," Michael said softly. "You want to prevent people from developing abilities."

"You don't? Ancestral magic is bad enough. Louise is confirmed ancestral, and yet she can talk to astral entities! We still don't know the full extent of what they can tell her, but what if she can just ask them for the nuclear codes?"

"Icarus could hack into the launch systems at any moment."

Travis narrowed his eyes. "He's already done that. But that's not the point. Ancestral magic is dangerous enough already. Imagine widespread Dungeon magic! At the very least, I want to control it, if not outright prevent it."

Michael hummed, not convinced that Travis' path was the right one going forward. Intellectually, he understood the perils, and a part of him wanted to agree with the man. Another part of him warned him against assuming the sort of controlling mindset that Travis wanted to push. Hopefully it wasn't going to come to that, but at the same time he decided to let Travis do his thing–supervised–for the time being.

"Well, we are working on the shield. It's not as easy as making a personal spell."

"You make creating a personal spell sound easy. I think you and I are the only ones who've done that in the whole Site 00, and not for a lack of trying."

"David also created a perception spell under my guidance when I helped him reach True Silver," Michael said. He didn't think either David or Travis qualified, though, since they only created the spell with his help.

After the conversation died down, Michael finally relaxed in his seat and closed his eyes. It was going to be a long flight to Rome, and he could use the time to relax.

His good intentions lasted less than an hour before he began fidgeting, thinking that he was wasting time. Fortunately, he had planned for the eventuality and knew what to do. With a mental flick of a switch, reality warped around him and he found himself in the cavernous space of his Skill Sanctum.

It was largely unchanged from the last time he'd been there. The only notable difference was that all his skills now glowed with magic: he had reinstated them all during the last big fight and had been reluctant to sunder them again. His Sanctum had also grown in size, now able to fit all the skills Michael had and still have room for one or two more—making the need to sunder skills much less urgent.

Walking up to one of the reinstated skills, Michael traced its edges with his finger. Like all others, it was a fractal of infinite size, with ever-smaller branches curling inward onto themselves. As it was just an Uncommon skill, the fractal wasn't too big and its complexity was limited.

Its edges were dull, a whole inch of the several-feet-wide fractal completely devoid of magical light, with another two or three inches of transition zone that got progressively brighter the closer it got to the center.

"Damage from sundering," Michael muttered.

A system message box appeared in his vision. He was momentarily taken aback before realizing that it wasn't the system talking to him, but Icarus.

The core systems of the skill seem to be intact. The current damage amounts to a 3% loss of power and flexibility. You can still overcome it with your Aura and manipulation abilities.

Michael nodded, but a hint of a frown remained on his face. He didn't like the limitation, but after many days of exposing himself to the power of Truth in the Twilight Steppes of David's Second Floor, he had found a path forward. Or rather, a vague direction forward, which was made of many hunches and gut feelings and not much substance yet.

Raising his hand, he commanded his own power and directed it towards the fractal. The etching in the wall began to move and shift, and Michael's face was graced by a smile for the smallest fraction of a second before something began to feel very wrong within him.

Lines and carvings he had only seen once before glowed an ominous red, not within the fractal but all around it. At the same time, a dull pain spread to Michael's whole body, ramping up in strength in an instant, making him double over coughing and hacking. He stopped what he was doing, and the pain vanished together with the angry red lines.

Recovering from the pain, which had come from the Sanctum itself being damaged and had been far worse than even the worst Truth had ever caused him, he walked back and forth.

"I wanted to fuse Body Enhancement and Fast Reflexes, but how can I do it if I can't even move the two fractals towards each other?"

It had seemed like a good idea, and for a moment Michael thought he could do it.

"It's not that the idea is wrong, I think. It's the red lines."

He walked back towards the center of the Sanctum. If he squinted, he thought he could see something on the walls, like a grand painting. But it was too faint.

Struck by what could only be called inspiration, he crouched next to his soul. The soul had taken the form of ethereal purple fire, a torch in the middle of the Sanctum that burned with his life force. Inside the fire, a ball of deep violet was his Soul Dantian.

"There!" he cried out.

Moving back and forth, the walls now revealed their secrets. When he looked at them through both the fire of his soul and the sphere of his Soul Dantian, the red lines that crawled up the walls became visible. Like a looking glass, or a periscope, he used this method to scout the Sanctum.

"Unity level up, Michael," Icarus said as he looked around. "Looks like you're on the right path."

He might be, he thought. But he didn't like what he found.