The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

Ducking, Michael narrowly dodged a bullet that had been shot his way. It flew past him, breaking a window and smashing tableware in an empty apartment with a vista. Ignoring the damage to somebody's second home, he climbed onto the elevated portion of the roof above the apartment and then lunged to the neighboring building.

A similar scene unfolded there. Goons with guns were waiting for him, already on the roof, and as he came down from the jump from the higher roof and into a roll, he barreled straight through some of the armed people. He didn't have time to wonder how they had appeared: a priest was with them, already mid-chant, and he couldn't let him finish. The amount of Faith he commanded was lower than the priest he had met in the catacombs, but Michael himself was much weaker than he had been.

He slammed into the priest, punching the man in the face but taking a bullet for it. His body had barely been repairing itself before, and now it took all the extra energy coming from the Body Dantian to even just stem the bleeding. Moving forward, Michael swept the legs of the other goons with his superior strength and then limped to the edge of the building.

He looked up. He would have to climb, but didn't have time to hesitate as the people he had barreled through moments before were already yelling and cursing as they got to their feet. One of them was aiming his gun at Michael. It suddenly grew hot, and the man let go of the metallic implement with a yell of pain and surprise.

The little trick had Michael bleeding from his nose. Wiping himself with his sleeve, he jumped to the next building and climbed up. This one was empty, allowing him to build some momentum running across the room and leaping on top of the next one.

This one was slanted, full of unsteady tiles. One had been knocked loose by his arrival, and was sliding down towards the road below. There were people there.

"Fuck!" Michael threw himself to intercept the tegola, then grabbed the steel gutter with a hand and yanked his body up and out, hearing the metal groan and detach from the old bricks before leaping to the next house and missing the roof by mere inches.

Instead of climbing, he slid down the wall and burst through the window into someone's living room. They were watching television, some sort of news channel with an old man with wavy grey hair and glasses and a table in the shape of a big number 7.

Michael apologized to the stunned man, first for the intrusion then for what he was about to do next. Aiming his foot at the door, he blasted it off its hinges and threw himself down the stairs towards the ground floor.

A swirl of Faith energy was all the warning he had before armed men appeared out of nowhere. He ran through them, but they were heavier than usual, pushed down by the priest's magic stabilizing them.

A touch of Truth broke through them, but also broke Michael's body further.

Then a Fiorino van burst through the street, screeched to a halt, and through a rolled-down window the driver beckoned Michael in. Icarus pinged him to trust the man, and Michael entered the vehicle, which sped away before he was even fully inside.

Then he spun up a shield just in time to see a couple of bullets impact it, turning it an ominous red before he was far enough away to feel safe.

"Thanks," he told the driver.

The man grunted at him, eyes on the road. At this speed, even his Italian blood, born and molded by the strange streets of Rome, needed to focus to avoid crashing into something.

They were attacked twice on their way out of the city, but even in his weakened state Michael managed to keep the mundane attacks at bay. Then the man dropped him off near the highway, pointing at the sea far ahead.

"The rest is on you, good luck," he said in broken English. "Near the sea, you cannot miss it."

He sped away perhaps even faster than he had gotten there. Michael broke into a run, through the fields close to the highway, moving at speeds that rivaled the vehicles on the road. This was nothing compared to his top speed, but it was beyond his ability at the moment.

Travis was waiting for him at the entrance to the airport, the sole immobile person in a sea of moving bodies. Around him, concealed, Delta Squad kept their eyes open in case Michael had been followed.

"Come on, let's get inside."

The cool, temperature-controlled air of the terminal was a stark contrast to the dry heat of the evening outside.

"I don't think they'll try anything out here in the open, but we better get a move on."

Michael nodded, "I suppose we have to go through the security checks."

Travis shook his head, "You took too long, man. Icarus bribed one of the guards; he'll let us through a back door. Follow me."

The back door turned out to be the TSA agent simply lifting the retractable belt and letting them bypass the security checkpoint, with several dozen people glaring holes into the back of their heads.

Their private jet was waiting for them with its engines revving hot. They swarmed inside, Travis closing the ramp as he entered last, having swept the runway with his sight and magic sense.

"We are going to have to trust that they'll let us leave, now."

Travis looked at Michael, "You can't sense if they get closer?"

"No. I'm having some… problems."

He slumped on his chair, touching his abdomen. The tips of his fingers were red with blood.

"You're bleeding," Travis said through the turbulence of takeoff.

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"No shit," said Michael. "Not for long, assuming they let us leave." After a while, he hummed. "They are letting us go like this, after all."

"This is far from over," said the head of Candle Light, "We don't exactly know who was behind this and what their motives are."

"Nor do we know their capabilities. This was a complete disaster."

Travis nodded gravely, "We fucked up when we decided having Icarus gather data was enough. We thought, no, I thought that given the urgency of the thing, it was good enough. It wasn't. I was wrong. It won't happen again."

"Things like this can happen, especially when you don't know your enemy. Let's go over the data: We have magical, Faith-wielding priests coming after us. The one who attacked me in the catacombs mentioned the Don, meaning that they are likely working together on this. Who the Don is, we can't be sure, but I'll bet my ass it's Casellaro, Carmela's boss."

"He knows you killed her," Travis said.

"And he wants revenge, that's for sure. But he must want something else as well. How long has he been working with the Faith-wielding priests? In fact, how many magical priests even are there? Is it the whole church or just some of them?"

"Yeah," grunted Travis, "We have no fucking clue."

"Hard to tell while operating from the US, isn't it?"

Travis arched an eyebrow. "Hard, but not impossible. We have non-standard resources at our disposal, plus a gigantic amount of more conventional methods and means. Give me a little time, I'll find out what we need to know."

Michael nodded.

Taking his mind off of the current emergencies, he fantasized about having a travel ability. He wasn't looking forward to spending the next several hours on a plane, not with his body hurting and aching with a broken Sanctum and a limited ability to heal. He had taken a lot of punishment to reach the airport, and was only now beginning to heal the damage.

It was going to be a long flight.

As Michael sat back in his seat and closed his eyes, Travis did the opposite. As soon as they had taken off and were stable on their flight path, the turbulence dwindled to a barely perceptible hum and shake of the plane, he sprang into action.

With the aid of Delta Squad, he used supplies Icarus had managed to have people load onto the plane before takeoff to turn a whole part of the commandeered private jet into a sort of control room. It wasn't pretty, but it was functional enough to coordinate the efforts back at Site 00.

The site was a flurry of activity. Following the news that someone had managed to get their hands on the private jet resting deep in Unity territory and sabotage it, the place had been put on high alert. The Technomancer had been put in a room with direct Icarus access, which meant access to any and all data that Unity Corporation had its hand on, and had been tasked to coordinate the search for the saboteur.

David, Johanne and even Drullkrin had taken to the field.

When more than a dozen hours later Michael and crew landed, there was still no news. By the time they also joined in the search, way too much time had passed and not even magic could help them much.

"Unless…" Michael thought, as he stared at the jet. Outwardly, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, but Icarus provided a neat graphic overlaid onto the real thing that showed all the reasons why it wasn't going to fly anytime soon. "Call Johanne."

"What is it, my lord?" she asked as soon as she arrived.

"Window into the Past," Michael said without fanfare.

The woman looked at him for a long moment, "I–" she began. Swallowing, she seemed to find her resolve, staring at Michael's eyes before nodding weakly. "Of course, allow me."

Michael felt the magic gather. More potent than ever, Johanne's spell now used the strange mutation of the element of Time she possessed to unravel the flow of events and grant a view into what has been.

The sensation was dulled, however, and any insight that seeing the process from up close might have granted him disappeared in the gaping hole that even now bled red energy into his Sanctum and wrung all his skills dry. He didn't fail to notice Johanne's wince when she activated the spell, however.

She gasped a little when he put a comforting hand on her back, before easing into his touch. Seemingly calmer, she allowed her eyes to close as she concentrated on the spell's feedback.

"Nothing's happening," Michael said after a while. They were alone out on a nearby hill, without people messing with the fabric of spacetime with their magic. "Wasn't there supposed to be a window to see into the past or something?"

"That is how the spell is supposed to work, yes." Johanne wiped sweat from her brow. Michael felt another surge of magic, then a sigh as it was cut off. "Something is preventing me from peering even a few hours back, let alone more. It feels like an insurmountable wall."

It was strange. She had been able to pierce the mists at the edge of the dungeon itself, and look as far back as she needed to see her old self dragged there by the Renegade. Why was she struggling with just a few hours in the real world?

"Two things come to mind," he said, thinking out loud. "There are only two things that can block your spell so thoroughly. Faith is one."

"Renegade Energy is the other," she finished. "Which one is it?"

It was Michael's turn to sigh, "Wish I could tell. But as I am right now, I can't see traces of either."

This elicited a worried look from the woman, "Your condition worries me, my lord. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Michael thought about it. In truth, the question had caught him off guard. Fixated as he had been on solving the problem on his own, he had never entertained the idea of having someone help him. Travis had not even offered, and although Michael knew that the man couldn't really do anything to help, now he found himself wondering if the lack of offer to help had been due to Travis knowing he could do nothing, or perhaps because his view of personal power and strength did not leave room for things such as this.

Michael too, for all he had built Unity itself as a support system and a tool to be used, had been relying more and more on his own power to do things rather than letting the people he had gathered specifically for that role help.

Perhaps he didn't like borrowed strength. Perhaps it was his old ethos of growth through struggle. Was it really a struggle if he let other people do the work while he reaped all the achievements?

He said as much out loud, or tried to, but wasn't sure he had the words to get his point across.

"Your thinking is correct, in general," Johanne replied.

Michael blinked in surprise, but she continued before he could speak.

"However, what is right in the general case can be wrong in a specific situation. You are not the kind of person to thrive on theft and stolen achievements. You have always given more than you have taken. To me, to David, to Travis, and to all the people who work for you and under you. Even your goals, ambitious as they are, are not selfish. You want to make the world a better place, do you not?"

"That's because I live in it."

"What of it?" she asked, "It is normal to want to improve one's condition. But you could improve yours much more easily through the suffering of others. Instead, you seek to lift them all up."

Michael mulled on it for a while as they walked back. By the time the half-completed towers of the Site were visible, feeling like they had been husks of steel and concrete for ages even though it had been barely a few weeks in the real world, he felt much lighter.

"Alright," he said, "It's not easy, but I'll try to let other people help me."

She beamed at him.

He held up a finger. "But first, we have this emergency to sort out. My Sanctum is weak and bleeding, but it's stable enough for now. It can wait."