Chapter 89

  Michael walked back to the treehouse, lost in thought. Beside him, Johanne was talking to herself about this and that facet of magic. Suddenly, Michael perked up.

  “What did you say about the elements?”

  “My lord, I was saying that unlike higher forms of energy, the Elements appear to need less outside structure to convey meaning. As you said earlier after your tests, they are rigid already, most of their meaning already inscribed into their very being. My preliminary tests with Elemental stones seem to confirm this, as did the fact that you could control and manifest two Elements together with your aura earlier, but failed to create any meaningful effect when you switched to mana. Mana is, as you said, more plastic.”

  “Really? And what about the stones?”

  Johanne hummed, “there was a whole team of programmers trying to figure out a language to make the stones do our bidding, making inscriptions with crushed mana crystals or using electrodes to stimulate the stones, but they kept failing. The stones just seemed to do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t that they had a will of their own, of course.”

  She took a breath, as if she was about to force out words she didn’t like. “It turns out, as much as it pains me to say, that the Elements are holistic in nature. It works in our favor, despite the lack of scientific rigor. Anyone with a manipulation ability can simply… tell them what to do, and they will do it, so long as it follows their nature. It takes effort, but it works. Higher magic does not work like this, as you saw with mana.”

  Michael was intrigued. Thinking back to how he used the Ice and Fire at his command to coat the bullet he used to kill Carmela—the idea of having taken a life still pained him as a human being—he realized that she was right. “I see. I can control them without fractals or complex structures. Just with thought.”

  “How long did it take you to figure it out?” the woman asked. It occurred to him that the programmers and researchers couldn’t have been here for longer than a day or two, which meant that they actually thought up the experiments and she carried them out in the dungeon, taking days or perhaps even weeks to carry them out and then coming back to the real world with the results.

  “No time at all. In fact, I was doing it without even realizing it, at first.”

  Johanne smiled, “as I thought, my lord, you have more talent than most people. We must put it to good use and gather more Elements.”

  “Not so fast,” Michael said, shaking his head. “I still have a limited capacity. It’s shy of 200 units right now. Not really enough to do much even when it’s all just one element. I think I’ll stick with Ice until the pool either gets bigger, or I find a way to integrate Ice within my aura.”

  “As you wish, you know better. The idea is sound, though,” she said, and Michael wondered whether she was being a yes-woman or if she really agreed with him. She did spend weeks of personal time trying to make the elements obey her and failed, while he succeeded rather easily.

  “If you keep using Ice,” she continued, “you might get familiar enough with it that integrating it with your aura will come easier.”

  Michael did not mention that he was pretty sure he needed Qi to do it. Theobond had told him so, and the blue humanoid seemed to know a great deal about dungeon magic—beyond Johanne’s own more scholastic understanding of the arcane.

  “Well, this has been a productive few days,” Michael said, stretching, “but it’s time for me to reemerge. I’m going to top-up on the Ice element and get out.”

  “Of course, my lord. See you outside.”

  ***

  Michael left Johanne behind to run some experiments in the Valley alone. They would—after all—reemerge roughly at the same time thanks to the dungeon’s time shenanigans. That was why, when she left the place several weeks of personal time later, she was surprised to see that Michael was nowhere to be seen. Halfway through performing the set of contingency procedures she had drilled into herself, he appeared in a swirl of magic.

  One minute after her, minus or plus some seconds. She quickly checked how many.

  “We might have a problem, my lo—Michael,” she said, still not used to calling him by name when they were in public.

  “What’s that?” he asked nonchalantly. Sometimes she wished she could be like him, carefree, but then she remembered how high his Resilience stat was and just what he must have lived through to get it. She too was plenty strong, mentally, but her experience in the amber had not translated well to Michael’s modern world. She then thought about Travis and his vices, and the thought died before it could progress.

  She took a deep breath, her voice defaulting to monotone. “You have emerged exactly 62 seconds after I did,” she said clinically. They had devices recording every access to the dungeon, linking every machine-recognized face to precise timestamps provided by an atomic clock buried underground.

  Michael hummed.

  “It could be a big deal, sir,” she said.

  “I know,” Michael said, much to her relief. At least he wasn’t ignoring the issue, not that he ever did. “We need to investigate.”

  “I shall be on it as soon as time permits, perhaps even sooner.”

  “Do not postpone the expeditions for this.”

  “Understood. I will make do in the interim, then. However, this could be a grave matter.”

  “You said it already,” said Michael. His face was tight and his voice tired. “What can I do about it now? We need to know if it’s just me or others as well. If it’s just me, we need to figure out what’s changed. Is it my growing power that the dungeon can’t keep up with? If it’s others as well, is it an issue with the dungeon itself?”

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  He and Johanne bounced some ideas back and forth on the way back to Site 00, after which she quickly excused herself so that she could bunker down in her temporary container-lab. She was frowning, she realized, thoughts gathered around not matters of magic, but the strange mood of her beloved lord. Did she make him mad?

  Her assistant was there, coordinating a team of particle physicists who were gushing over a single mana crystal.

  “We can’t really know what the hell this material even is, without proper instruments,” she heard them mutter, “how can we know what this is if we can’t blast it with high energy particles?”

  “In due time,” she said imperiously, and suddenly the room grew quiet. “Our toys will arrive soon, but not before the actual lab is built. They are fragile, as you know. Now, to get your mind off of such tragedies like delays and being forced to wait, here is a conundrum. Michael has just left the dungeon 62 seconds later than usual. It’s the first time it has happened, and as far as we know it has only affected him. While we wait for more data, I want you to formulate hypotheses and plans. It is imperative we figure out what is going on, and fast.”

  ***

  Michael sat in the shade of a temperature-controlled gazebo together with Old Dave, Travis, and Johanne. They were in the deep forest close to the dungeon, and since it was the middle of summer it should have been humid, hot, and stifling. Instead, thanks to some cleverly constructed Elemental arrays, the space within the boundaries of the open-air gazebo was kept at a pleasant 75F.

  Crossing the invisible threshold into the forest proper was enough to start sweating again, but the place was spacious enough for all four of them. It helped that only Michael and Old Dave were sitting, while the others stood watching Jennifer and Trevor shout orders to the Operators assembling near the entrance to the dungeon. Both Johanne and Travis seemed nervous, for some reason. Tense.

  “Listen up, troops! This is no stroll through the woods. I expect focus and precision. First team, you’re up. Lone delvers, you go in after the teams. Iron-ranks with no skills, you are to go between teams.”

  “Man,” Michael commented, “she sure looks like a whole other person when issuing orders to her underlings.”

  “You should see Mr. CEO when he gets all fired up,” Johanne said, eyeing Travis. “Some people say he’s outright scary.”

  The man in question did not take the bait.

  To the side, Old Dave snorted. “I think everyone in the chain of command is rather different with their men than they are with Michael. For good reason.”

  “…and, that’s my cue,” said Travis as Jennifer was about to finish her drill sergeant-style speech.

  The man squared up, the very air around him crackling with power and authority. A side effect of his aura, and Michael took the chance to study it with his magic sight and insights he gleaned in the dungeon.

  Travis’ aura had the desired effect, and immediately all Operators went stiff and focused their attention on the head of Candle Light. Travis’ fame also helped, having by now reached outright fantastical and scary levels. He was, according to the rumors, the figure nobody wanted to make an enemy of, the scary man at the top, the one who kept the whole thing standing by sheer power of force, authority and will. The scary boogeyman.

  They were definitely right, but Michael knew the limits of Travis’ power. He would have to talk to him because, while powerful, Travis definitely needed to be carried up to Silver rank before they met with the OA. His aura was woefully weak, and would not protect the man if things went south. He had thought Travis would come to him demanding a power-up, but instead found himself having to go to the man himself. A part of him wondered if it was all a power ploy, before deciding that he did not care.

  The man addressed the Operators, assembled in lines with teams on one side and lone Operators on the other. He instructed them on what to do in the dungeon, how to engage the monsters and what to do once they cleared the dungeon. Michael was aware that each Operator had been drilled on these things for days already.

  Then, Travis set clear limits and reminded the Operators of the control protocols.

  After that the first team went in. Travis moved on to address the other teams, waiting for the first team to emerge ten minutes later.

  “They could go in right now,” Old Dave observed.

  Johanne nodded. “We have decided not to send them all at once. It’s much easier to control the output this way.”

  Indeed, ten minutes later, right before the first team reappeared, Johanne got up and took position. Michael too approached the dungeon, leaving the temperature-controlled gazebo with a grimace. Fortunately, the Ice in his aura could be used to mitigate the hellish summer temperatures, although not without sacrificing a lot of his stored Elemental Ice in the process.

  The team materialized at the threshold, and Michael’s eyes blazed with magic as his [Magic Sense] flared up. For good measure, he swept the men with his aura as well, getting faint echoes of something. They were too garbled and weak to recognize, but already he was seeing yet another use of his aura abilities.

  “All low copper and one mid-copper,” he said, not reacting to the system message. The four men stood at attention, but they were battered and bruised and struggled to stand. Their equipment was clean, thanks to the dungeon, but it was in bad shape.

  However, it was nothing compared to their faces. They were haunted, hollow, outright terrified. Up until ten minutes ago, they regarded Michael as if he was just another person, but now they seemed to instinctively understand the vast gulf between them and him, despite Michael having never shown them the true depths of his magic. He withdrew his aura, and they relaxed a little.

  “You three,” Michael continued, hiding his inner feelings as more and more things about his aura were made evident now that he was interacting with normal people. “You are cleared to go to Jennifer for debriefing. Remember to write down a detailed report of all your abilities.”

  The last man gulped. “You,” Michael said, smiling. It didn’t have the effect he hoped, instead making the trained soldier who must have seen hell on earth shiver in his boots. “Higher auras go to Travis; you know that, right?”

  The man nodded. He glanced in Travis’ direction for a fleeting moment. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I-I shall go to Chief Tyrell immediately.”

  “Good. Before that, how did you end up at a higher level than even your squad leader?”

  “Squad leader Tormundine said I was more talented than the others, sir. He said he had orders to let me take the lead in combat, sir.”

  Michael nodded. “Go on.”

  The man was stiff. “We hit a bit of a snag when a few of the guns were damaged, sir. I took the lead with my magic skill from that point onwards, sir.”

  Michael squinted, focusing his aura. The man recoiled but then stood his ground, a testament to his training. “It’s a good melee skill,” Michael said, having glimpsed enough. “Tell Travis I’d like to have you promoted to squad leader. You can go.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the man said, saluted, and bolted.

  “You’re scaring the grown men, Michael,” Old Dave joked.

  Michael shrugged. “They have opened their eyes to the gulf between us.”

  Old Dave shook his head. “I too have, you know? I know what they see, yet I do not react like they do, do I?”

  “Well, that’s because we are friends.”

  “There’s another difference between Travis and me and them,” the man said pensively. “We never did go in the dungeon alone, did we?”

  “Travis did,” Michael said.

  “He’s not representative of the whole wider population. Did you know that he claims to be crazy? Besides, he barely even goes to the Valley to work. He only fights through the first floor because he has to. Myself? Twice I tried to go in alone, and let me tell you… I am never doing it again if I can help it.

  He sighed. “I know I can’t avoid going there eventually because I need to get stronger. Alone, though? Nah. That place, it does something to you. When the next batch of Operators comes out, look at their faces. Really look at them. You’ll understand. And if not, just talk to them once they calm down, if they ever do. At least, the silver lining is that with such a fear of powerful magic, our Operators will never underestimate an Anomaly when they get sent to deal with it. God knows we will need them.”

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