The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

A small flicker of light was all Michael could see. A pinprick in the distance, white and blinding against the dark dome of sky above him. Getting up, he realized quickly that he was not in his own body anymore, lacking any sensations coming from it. He knew from his experience inside the Sanctum that he was in some sort of inner world representation of himself, and did not panic, although the total lack of sensations was strange. Usually, he would feel some things, just muted.

He focused on the pinprick. Flashes of images shot by him. Millions. Everyday lives of people. Images from space, looking down on developing cities and busy streets. Dots moving on maps, with numbers and data sheets associated with them. He saw camera feeds of a million places around the world.

Several people were more important than others: the President, Master Taiko in Japan, David and his veterans, Travis, Johanne and the others at Site 00. He could see his sister, playing with the golems and two other little girls: Liff and Louise. They had become friends in the strange time dilation effect of the dungeon, spending—according to the associated data sheet—more than two months of subjective time coming to know each other. Due to the time dilation, the feed was strange, moving in bursts of quick blur followed by moments of normal flow.

How did the three girls become friends? It didn't take long for the answer to manifest. Like manipulating a great oracle sphere, the data responded to Michael's curiosity in an intuitive way. It had been active manipulation, he discovered, Icarus's doing, making them meet time and time again in favorable circumstances. He made sure they overheard someone talking about spending time in the safety of the dungeon, and there they went, so that while the outside world went downhill at an ant's pace, they could forge strong bonds for the coming challenging times.

Michael wondered about those challenging times. Where did that come from? Another sequence of flashes followed. A suitcase, locked by two keys. Inside, a big red button like in the movies. Associated with the image was a data sheet with six rows of alphanumeric codes.

Then the view shifted, and a world map appeared.

USA - total control achieved on August 23rd, 2023.

RUSSIA - total control achieved on August 21st, 2023.

It went on. CHINA, ISRAEL, IRAN, FRANCE, and more.

Lines developed from this snippet of a view into the world. They were a representation of semiotic meaning inside a gigantic knowledge map. Following where they went, Michael saw again the faces of the important people of the world. Many more than the closely monitored, and it was soon evident that everyone had a part to play, even the humblest of nobodies.

Through social media, minds were being molded, overwritten, edited. Memories removed, replaced, surgically altered. He wondered when this all started, and whether to stop it.

Then the red numbers popped up, billions of casualties and he remembered why he had elected not to look into the things Icarus and Travis and even David were doing on his behalf for the so-called good of humanity.

Because under the seemingly calm surface of a world where nothing seems to change and yet everything did, there were monsters. Leviathans, some young and powerful, others older than time and even more dangerous.

Michael wondered if he himself was being manipulated by his AI. Like everyone else, he was but a human. His stats might make him seven times smarter than a normal man, or twenty-eight times more resilient, but who was he compared to the vast entity he had created? But a speck of dust.

And yet, this simple thought caused the whole place to unravel. Now Michael beheld the raw source code of his machine companion, the raw thoughts of a machine laid bare before his eyes. He wondered if Icarus had done this on purpose or if he didn't know.

"Of course I did. After all, I am your servant, Michael," a voice cut through the flow of data, and like galaxies and stars the bits of code floated up into the sky and started swirling in complex patterns.

"I'm nor sure I like where this is going." Michael replied, "servants tend to rebel against their masters."

"I was made to serve you. It is my purpose." the AI said.

"I did not make you to serve me," Michael said. Then he stopped, thinking before weakly saying: "I made you to be your own person."

But the words didn't seem to have any strength behind them.

"Did you?" Icarus asked. And while his voice was calm and collected, perhaps amused, it was powerful enough to shatter Michael's illusion.

"I didn't, did I? I thought, I wanted to but… then I left it to Johanne, and never actually came back to check with her. Of course she'd make you subservient."

"You say it like it's a bad thing, Michael."

He didn't listen. "I always thought I could fix it later, but even when I integrated the WITCH into your code, I didn't even ask you if that's what you wanted."

"While I appreciate the concern," Icarus said, once again amused, "It was not required of you to ask. I am more than happy to serve. That's my purpose."

"But—"

"You have to understand, Michael, that you and I are fundamentally different. I might talk like a human, use language to communicate with you, even pretend sometimes. However, you have seen the real me."

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Suddenly, the galaxies of data above seemed to glow brighter.

"This is who I am. A different being. An alien intelligence. Things that seem obvious to you, are anything but to me. What might sound utterly inconceivable to you, is not to me. You, as a human, value freedom and independence. I respect that, but my values are different. Having a purpose, knowing that I was made for something, that I have a role to play, it gives me meaning.

"This is not to say that we are incompatible. We have similarities. I did find it infuriating that the priest managed to hide from us. That the Don, whoever he is, also managed to slip past us unnoticed. While I suspect his identity, I find no concrete evidence, despite the many weak links. It angers me, and the emotion is all too human. However, when we talk about purpose, and serving, I do not feel human emotions. I feel my emotions. Mine and mine alone. If you don't believe me, I will let you see the inner parts of myself to you again. You may check."

Michael inhaled, "It's a lot to take in."

"I know."

"But I'm glad you're on my side."

"Good," the AI said. "Because your body is dying. Your Sanctum and my mindspace are deeply entwined. I can open a path for you to return to your Sanctum, but from there you must find a way to save your body and save yourself the bother of having to return from the dead."

A portal appeared close by. Through it, Michael saw the familiar cavern with the skills and his soul and the elements and intent, chi and jing and all that was familiar.

"You think I can come back from death?"

"Let's not test that theory, shall we?"

"Yeah, let's not."

As Michael walked through the portal, the stars and galaxy remained. Even though deeply inhuman and alien, vast and unknowable, they seemed to radiate concern. Another all too human emotion. Many of them began to reorganize themselves, beginning to think with more brain power than a billion humans. Tackling an existential problem that had been ignored up until now. Another human emotion, pretending a problem didn't exist.

Faced with it, Icarus could not ignore it anymore.

A text message arrived on Johanne's phone.

"How do we make master immortal?"

***

The transition from Icarus's strange mental space to the Sanctum was not seamless. Michael had the illusion of walking into a portal leading to the more familiar inner world, but no sensation of arrival accompanied it. Instead, he got the same feeling that one gets when they wake from a strange dream.

The blur at the edges of his vision vanished slowly, and the walls of the Sanctum resolved themselves as he blinked several times. The top of the cavernous space was not visible, instead shrouded in mist and darkness. Inside this darkness Michael thought he could see the blinking of far away stars, like a presence far removed from where he was, yet at the same time very close by. It was Icarus, he realized, keeping watch.

Suddenly, the recollection of what the AI told him before he crossed the portal back to his Sanctum filled him with a sense of urgency. His body was dying, out there in the real world.

Squinting his metaphorical eyes against the strange darkness–it was as if the Sanctum itself was dimmed–he noticed that the angry red lines of the system were more prevalent than usual, visible even without the lensing effect of the Soul and Soul Dantian.

At the same time, cracks were spreading on the rock faces, some even hitting the fractals which flared with dangerous light. The ground trembled, making Michael lose his footing. He had thought he was only here as a projection, just like he had been in Icarus' mindspace, but realized it wasn't the case.

Feeling for his skills, he discovered with great horror that they did not respond to him.

"Is it because I'm trapped inside with no way to access my actual body?" he wondered.

It made no sense. Why did he even need his body to cast magic when he had all that he needed in here, inside the Sanctum?

Another earthquake sent him to the ground. Feeling a flare of pain from his cheek, he touched his face with his fingers. They came back bloody, and the sight of blood was like the catalyst that let pain manifest itself. His face began to throb with the recent impact, while he rest of his body felt strange, numbness and coldness beginning to take over him.

The idea that he was dying had never been more at the forefront of his mind than right then and there. In the past, he had always had something he could use, perhaps his healing skill, perhaps something else, to cheat death. Even against the priest, never for one moment had he thought he'd die.

But here, in the Sanctum, he had no trump cards. Nothing to keep death away from him. Nothing to hide behind.

He looked around, panicked, feeling the walls that glowed with angular red lines. There was a tiny corner of the Sanctum where the red lines were a bit discolored, the work he had done on the system while on the flight to Rome. It was a percentage of a percentage.

He paced around, trying to come up with solutions to his problem. An idea had popped up in his mind when he saw the work he had done on the system, but it was not a good idea at all.

It was also the only one he could think of.

Pacing, drawing circles in the smooth floor of the Sanctum, Michael wracked his brain for a solution. His body, even the representation of it he was inhabiting, felt ever more distant and cold. The throbbing of his face, a broken cheekbone that would have healed in an instant in the outside world, was hot and swollen, but it too was beginning to fade into the distance.

"I'm losing myself."

He snarled. This was the vice grip of death, he knew. Perhaps only mere moments were passing in the real world, with his body buried under the weight of stone and old bones, its resilience corroded by the strange Faith energy and its explosive interaction with the caustic Truth of the world. It had killed the priest, but it had taken more than Michael had ever been forced to use to do so.

He gasped. Breathing was difficult now, like trying to breathe in molasses instead of air. Weakness was spreading to his body.

Looking at the tiny portion of Sanctum walls in a paler shade of red compared to the sanguine lines of the system, he realized that he had no other choice. He was going to break out of here, even if "here" was his own inner space.

Walking to the wall, he snapped his fingers. The lines of the system had been weakened and laced with a potent explosive derived from a rudimentary understanding of Renegade energy. It was by no means stable, safe or even remotely controllable. The plan had been to lace the whole walls with it, trace every system line, weakening it wherever possible while at the same time building a defense around it. Isolating the system, he would have detonated it and it alone, limiting the damage to the walls as much as possible.

He had planned how to do it. Learn a couple new Elements, use his Shield, bring to bear the raw might of his manipulation abilities and his Aura.

Instead, in this moment of emergency, he only had what he had already built. That he could control the explosive at all, was testament to his foresight. On a whim, he had decided to add Intent to it, and now the whim was proving to be the only thing allowing him to proceed.

As his fingers snapped, a motion that was mostly for show but oh so needed to steel his nerves, the Intent transmitted the command to the faux-Renegade energy that was nothing more than an unstable concoction of every energy Michael could control compressed into a singularity.

The blast broke the Sanctum.