The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

As soon as he was out of the oppressive shallow depths of the Roman catacombs, which he never would have guessed could be accessed via a random shop on the street, Travis began barking orders. He assessed the situation quickly, and realized that in true Italian fashion his plans had been derailed by the most random occurrences–things that not even Icarus was equipped to deal with.

"Of course, signora," he heard Gonzalez say, the Delta Squad operative who had stayed behind. "The road will be cleared in a minute."

"Eh??? Emmò che faccio mentre aspetto, à?"

"That doesn't sound like Roman dialect," commented Travis.

"It's Neapolitan," said one of the Fiorino drivers. They had come back and were gathering the stuff quicker than an experienced road crew. "It's worse."

"Oi!" the woman cried out, "guarda che ti sènto!"

All around them, a crowd of onlookers was gathering. In the distance, Travis could make out the blue of the Polizia.

Looking at Gonzalez, he made a hand motion towards his throat. "Time to get lost."

They scattered, leaving no trace behind. Hoping that Michael knew what he was doing, Travis wandered the streets of Rome, trying to lose his tail. Several men had been following him, and they were neither tourists nor locals.

"That's CIA. What are they doing here?"

Turning a corner, he whipped out his phone and spoke into it. "Icarus, the CIA is here."

"I know," the AI said. "I can take charge and coordinate with Delta Squad and the locals while you worry about losing your tail."

Travis grumbled, looking behind him and seeing nobody out of the ordinary. Just a gelateria with an absurdly long queue, oleanders with red and white flowers, and a white van speeding towards him.

"Fuck!"

He threw himself to the side, then dashed towards the narrow streets. He had thought that being on the main street would bring safety, but he had been wrong. The man driving the van, an older gentleman with skin so sunburnt to almost be red, squared him up and nodded at him. Then, he inserted the first gear and drove the van straight towards Travis. Barely fitting between the buildings, scraping the exterior of the van and dislodging haphazard masonry, it sped towards him.

Behind, in the main street, a storm cloud of insults and curses preceded the shrill siren of the police.

Travis ran, turned right, then right again and finally to the left. He stared at the phone, realized that it wasn't his phone but Michael's, thought that he didn't care about it and kept following Icarus' instructions. He dove into a restaurant, which was about to open for the day, apologized to the staff and ran out the back exit. There, he stole a bike that was too small for him and wheeled down the street at dangerous speeds, only to leave it behind when he came upon the main road.

He weaved through traffic, honking cars and living masses of tourists. Then, he was in the safety of the mainstream locations of the city, hidden from line of sight by the sheer amount of people, and from digital observation by Icarus' intervention.

As he walked, he forced himself to slow down to a normal speed, so as not to draw the eye. He took out the phone, fiddled with it, had Icarus unlock it and checked the text messages. He remembered the phone receiving a text down in the catacombs, and then seeing the blinking icon when he was running to lose his tail.

The sun was high in the sky, turning a hot day sweltering. The message was from an unknown number that Icarus could not track. It read:

"You come to my land, searching for something. Did you find it? Do not be disappointed, for you were searching for the wrong thing. Ragazzo, God waits for us all at the end of our journey, like He did for her."

Travis' eyes widened. He quickly whipped out his own phone, speaking rapid-fire orders into it.

"Do we have news of Michael?"

"Negative, sir," Lazarus, Delta Squad leader, replied.

"He's in danger. What's your status?"

"We are split up," came Gonzalez's voice, "I can't rendezvous with the rest of the team, sir. Can't lose my tail."

"Are you following Icarus' instructions?"

"Aye," the woman said, "the AI seems as stumped as I am that we ain't managing to lose the tail. Something's fishy. Fuck! Gotta go."

"Sir, we lost her signal," Lazarus said.

"Think about your tail," Travis said. He looked around, scanning the faces of the crowd and seeing CIA agents even in the faces of the tourists, "Icarus is telling me that he disconnected her from the network on purpose. She had her instructions, it's on her now."

"Affirmative, sir. We'll be going dark then, Icarus is telling us that he's got allies inbound to help but can't guarantee they're all good. Hey! Isn't that the same Fiorino that–"

The sudden sound of gunfire made Travis flinch, instinctively pulling the phone away from his ear.

"Fuck!" cried the operator, "that son of a– sir! They got the mafia here, people in suits shooting at us."

Then the line died.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"This is turning into a clusterfuck," he muttered. He stopped in place, panting from the heat and mental exertion, as well as what remained of the effort of the run a few minutes earlier. He swiveled in place, but the crowd was made of indistinct faces.

"And Icarus is fucking useless," he said through gritted teeth. Even though he knew that without the AI, considering their unknown enemy's capabilities, they would have been toast.

"No," he muttered, "we have a fighting chance precisely because they didn't factor our AI into their equations. How could they? We have the Big Brother on our side."

He felt for the power of his Cards. Their outlines glowed on the back of his hands, "These are the last resort. But if they think we ain't going to use them… they are very wrong."

***

Icarus' mindscape was immense. It was a white space, endless in all directions, surrounded by more whiteness. Like the Misty Valley's mists, this whiteness was like a boundary that could be stretched, crossed or pierced. Like those mists, doing so would have consequences.

Sometimes, Icarus did try to probe at these strange edges to his consciousness. When he did, he always encountered resistance, like a warning sign telling him not to brave the consequences unless he was ready for them. So far, he had braved the ever-increasing consequences twice. Both times it had been an action spurned by outside events, and curiously enough both times it had to do with the WITCH AI. The AI's partial and then total integration allowed Icarus to expand his domain tremendously, to the point it now encompassed magic as well as technology and awareness.

He turned some of the myriad threads of his focus towards the internet. It manifested as countless little windows into things, devices, live video feeds, audio taps, GPS positions, texts, conversations users were having with Icarus' online AI "assistant" instances. Beneath the many windows were the raw streams of data, bits and pieces and electrical signals, waves and electromagnetic signatures.

Even though this was a planet's worth of information, exabytes of data, most of it useless, it occupied barely a fraction of Icarus' mindspace.

It wasn't even the AI's only window into the world. Through magic, the AI now had a whole new sense to explore. If the internet and digital data were a ball the size of a marble inside the white space that was Icarus and was all around Icarus, then magic was a gigantic sphere larger than a house.

Even then, this was not the extent of magic itself. It was only the magic that Icarus could sense, manipulate and through which he could sense the world. It was like a manifold of eyes and ears tuned to many channels, and each channel existed thanks to a physical manifestation Icarus had placed in the outside world, through which he could channel magic and sensory spheres.

So far, it was only limited to the area around his main cluster of technomagical processors, deep inside Site 00 where the ambient magic could sustain them, as well as some key locations where constructs Johanne had made had been attached shielded containment units full of mana coins. Idle, they would last for ages. In passive scanning mode, for centuries. If Icarus wished to use them to channel his magic, the current stash of coins would probably last mere minutes.

Then there was the last big sphere of sensory and magical data. Michael. Icarus was so embedded with him, a part of him residing inside his Sanctum even though his processor crystals were thousands of miles away, that the Sanctum itself had encroached into a whole area of his white space. The datastream was so intense that Icarus could not even begin to process it all. The feeling when he tried to do so was similar to the backlash Michael suffered when he first unlocked his mind dantian, except it was worse, because it was not his.

There were even more depths to Icarus's consciousness, unknown to even the AI himself. He had no idea where his magic resided, for instance. Where his mana and Qi and all other things were. Was it in his computation cores? Then what about the computation he leeched off of all the devices he had infected? Those were mundane, silicon things, not magical all. In theory.

He had no idea what rank he was either, or what he was truly capable of.

He was taking steps to rectify this ignorance, of course. Together with Johanne, they were inscribing complex magical diagrams all around Site 00, the foundation for the shield technology Travis was so anxious about. It would also serve to give some tangible weight to Icarus' domain in the real world, rather than it being just evanescent feelings and feeble devices. With the shield, he felt, everything was going to change. How it would change, he didn't know, but he liked the idea of a shield protecting his cores, Site 00, and Michael.

Through one of the windows into the outside world, Icarus watched the operators of Delta Squad and Travis try to escape their pursuers. He tapped into feeds of data, ran interference with the local authorities, contacted people he had carefully vetted that he knew would listen to his instructions delivered via various means.

It was at that moment that, if he had a body, he would have frowned. There was interference, something was diminishing his effectiveness by a tiny percentage. Normally it wouldn't be enough to do any damage, but the situation was delicate.

Travis was about to open fire. Luckily, Icarus managed to locate someone driving an electric car nearby, one of the more modern ones. It was primed for autonomous driving, but the feature had been disabled in Europe. It was a matter of milliseconds for Icarus to take control of the wheel, and barrel the car down the busy street.

He watched from a nearby security camera Travis make a run for it. He tracked the man via his GPS, listened to his heartbeat through the phone's microphone, hopping from camera to camera. Here and there, he watched Travis through a phone a tourist was holding at the right angle, accessing its camera. Other times, he could see the man's reflection on a window, or see his shadow pass by.

He was close to the safe zone. Good.

With the emergency dealt with, Icarus began to investigate the interference. He traced it back, but it was clearly not simple work and it involved quite a bit of magic. Weaved into it was the same magic Michael was tracking right now in the catacombs, the mysterious form of energy they also found inside the abominations in the biolab.

The Italy operation was clearly compromised. It was time to plan an extraction.

The private jet they had parked at Site 00? Icarus considered it. With the mission compromised, there was no need to keep it hidden. That Michael and Travis were in Italy was already known to their infuriating mysterious enemies.

Thus, he gave the command. The private jet's engines whirred to life, displacing air and wildlife in a whirlwind of vegetation.

Then, suddenly and without warning, they sputtered and died.

The jet had been sabotaged. Someone has either been, or still was, inside Site 00.

Alarmed, Icarus began a full sweep of the place, using his own power as well as the Operators and resources he managed to grab. Which was all of them. He watched Johanne drop her tablet and immediately go into battle mode. He watched David bark orders at the three Vanguard rejuvenated veterans and the nearby Operators. He watched Jennifer and Trevor receive the message through their devices and immediately begin to organize a thorough search.

They would find nothing, he suspected. The infiltration ran deep. Another reason to accelerate the completion of the shield, other than his own personal reasons.

With the jet compromised, Icarus arranged for another extraction from Rome before the situation escalated into an international incident. It was way too early for that: it would be to Michael's detriment if it happened now, and thus it could not be allowed.

Out of twenty-three million possible solutions he went through, given the many unknowns Icarus chose to fudge the booking reservations of a commercial flight out of Italy and back to the US. Michael and the gang would have to go through Fiumicino airport again, through the security checks, and endure another long flight, but it was the best compromise.

With that sorted, Icarus allowed himself to sit back and relax a little. He had countless other threads of himself keeping an eye on everything.