The Infinity Dungeon [LitRPG]

After he was done catching up and doing the rounds with everyone, Michael rushed to the dungeon. It was a critical time, with a storm brewing at the horizon, but it was not on their heads yet and he thought he could afford to take ten minutes to sort out his own problems. His outward appearance was fine, but his Sanctum was a mess and his magic was in disarray.

It was more than evident when he tried to clear the first room of the first floor with overwhelming Fire and Ice but all he managed was to scorch a goblin and chill the bones of a skeleton. He could do more, he felt, but not without seriously overexerting himself.

With a snap of his fingers, a Distortion Sphere annihilated both enemies.

"Well, I guess it's back to the basics."

Slowly, methodically, he made his way through the first two rooms. Not only was his magic less powerful, but his body felt out of sorts. It had felt like that ever since the fight against the priest and his damn Faith Magic, and the sensation of wrongness was more than just distracting. It was outright dangerous.

Swinging his arm, Michael tried to behead a goblin with pure strength. Instead, for the first time in ages, he felt the impact in his arm and the goblin was only a little dazed. A Distortion Sphere later and the monster was no more. The sudden draw on magic lit the Sanctum up like fireworks, most of it disappearing in the gaping maw of red lines and leaking energy. Some of it was absorbed in the man-made tunnel leading to the Body Dantian, never to be seen again.

Holding himself against the wall, Michael struggled not to slump down. He was panting like a dog, sweat wetting his clothes and making his hair stick to his face. In a surge of anger, he summoned a shield shard that was sharper than the sharpest knives and cleaved the offending hair out of the way.

The lock fell to the ground, ignored. Icarus whispered something, but the AI too was ignored.

Instead, Michael turned to the wall and screamed in anger, small explosions rocking the cavern as punch after punch obliterated the first layer of stone and revealed the magically reinforced bedrock of the dungeon.

He only stopped when his hands and arms were too mangled to function. He collapsed on the ground, exhausted. The front of his T-shirt was red with blood, and while he had sealed his arms with shields, blood loss was making him dizzy.

The empty room swam and swayed. Switching from passive healing to active healing, Michael watched his arms reform at a snail's pace. Inside his Sanctum, all his magic was leaking into the air and vanishing save for a small trickle descending into the Body Dantian. The red lines of the System pulsed.

"Fuck," he muttered.

Up until now, he had never known defeat. Sure, he had lost sometimes, but he had never experienced a true setback.

"I thought I could just… man up and brave the storm. Like I did on the dwarf floor, just suck it up and keep at it until the obstacle was removed."

And, in his mind, it was still the right path. Hell, it looked like the only path. Even though he had promised Johanne he would let other people help him, here he was in the dungeon alone. His plan had been to reach the Valley and try to find a solution to his problem alone, but barely at the second room of the first floor, he had broken down, as if the damage to the Sanctum was also affecting his mental landscape.

The thought was like the crack of thunder splitting a clear sky. What if the damage was actually affecting his mind?

He got up, paced, watched the stumps that were his arms slowly regrow. He had never noticed how hard it was to walk on the uneven surface of the dungeon with his skills muted and his arms nonexistent. He wanted to scream and cry, but swallowed back the tears of anger and loss with the thought that—although slowly—the arms were actually growing back.

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It was a luxury most other people did not have.

Slowly, a semblance of calm settled over his mind. It was a fragile equilibrium, but by the time his arms were back, he felt ready to tackle the last room. There, he again fought the goblins and skeleton bosses with Distortion Fields and raw strength. He felt the subtle guidance of Okinawan Mastery, a skill he had long neglected because of its limited use. Now it was shining through, much less affected by the weakening of the Sanctum compared to the others.

He let it guide him. It made a world of difference. It was as if, so far, he had been fighting like a beast. Raw strength and magic had allowed him to steamroll his opponents, and when it had not been enough then Truth came clutch and finished the job for him.

Now, however, he was forced to actually struggle for the first time in what felt like ages. It was in situations like this that Okinawan Mastery shone the brightest. By the time the last monster was dead, his appreciation for technique was renewed. He felt like he understood, even though the thought clashed with his experience that raw power dwarfed everything. Perhaps he was still right, but there was room for other things as well.

The expected door leading down to the Valley did not appear. In its stead, Michael found the passage to another room.

"A fourth room?" he was puzzled, but then he remembered the build-up of magic he had been feeling the last few delves. "Did the dungeon add another room?"

He peered inside, but like all times it was impossible to see what awaited in a room unless you stepped into it. With a shrug, he did.

The fight that ensued was bloody, long and grueling. Michael came out on top, but he was left so broken that it took a day for his healing to restore him to a somewhat functional state. The room had thoroughly humbled him. And it made him angry.

"This fucking place. It made a whole new room to counter ME!"

He punched the wall again, this time wrapping his fist with a Shield. He felt something shift inside his Sanctum, some sort of enlightenment, and he gasped. He watched the Shield and the Distortion Field skills begin to resonate, similar to what he had always planned to do. They were doing it on their own! They were about to fuse together, creating a—

The whole Sanctum lit up red. The two skills began to vibrate, brought together by their evolution, but it was as if the red lines were trapping them in place. The skills struggled mightily, and one then two red lines broke and began to leak their red ether into the air. A lot more followed.

Michael watched with rapt attention the process unfold. The skills were breaking free of their bindings. It seemed that the System could not stop the evolution and fusion of two Uncommon skills.

The joy Michael felt was raw and pure. This sight was like a healing balm to his Soul.

It shattered a moment later. The whole Sanctum shifted, rocks falling from the ceiling and damaging everything. More cracks spread, all the fractals in the walls dimming and fraying. A huge fault line split the whole place in twain, separating rock and red lines both, creating new weaknesses in the structure of the System which in turn started to suck Michael dry even faster to attempt to repair itself.

In their failure to do so, the System lines brightened around the two evolving skills.

"No…" Michael muttered. "No!"

The two skills shattered. A whole section of the wall exploded, taking out three other fractals and starting a chain reaction of excess energy that ignited his mana pool. The explosion sent his projection hurling into the void outside the Sanctum space, revealing not more rock but the absence of everything.

In the distance, unable to find purchase in the weightless nothingness outside what he thought had been the entirety of his Soul, Michael watched his Sanctum collapse, crumbling inwards, imploding and then reaching a critical mass.

A bright light blinded him for a moment, but no shockwave came. There was no air, and even if there was, this was not the real world but a place of concepts and ideas.

When he opened his eyes again, all that Michael could see was a void. At the center of this void, growing smaller as he hurled away from it, was a small nova of all the energies that had survived the blast. Around it, in an accretion disc of debris like a solar system, the remains of his Sanctum drew an unstable orbit. They hit each other, smashed into still-whole parts, created more debris. He watched a skill fractal that had somehow survived the ordeal shatter into a million pieces by a clump of rock that had a few Dantian fragments in it.

Some pieces fell into the nova at the center, others were thrown into even more unstable orbits. Others tried to escape, hurling in the void, just like Michael was.