Chapter 90

  Michael kept playing his role well into the night. They sent teams and men into the dungeon until there were none left. The pace was frenetic at first, then became dictated by the speed they managed to process the people coming out.

  In the end, three people failed to re-emerge after the ten-minute window out of the more than fifty Operators they sent in. One was a member of a squad, and his squadmates had seen him die in combat. The other two were Operators who had volunteered to go in alone.

  One had been outfitted with skill stones to kickstart his magic, while the other had entered the dungeon as a normal Iron-rank human. There was no trace of them now, and no way to know their fate. There had been two other such crazies who went in basically naked, without equipment or magic, and managed to come out alive and much more powerful than the rest. They had been thoroughly debriefed, their abilities recorded and added to the growing database of magical systems, and their allegiance secured with an Oath to Michael.

  As for the missing two… they knew the risks. There was always the possibility that something else was going on, and that they would come out eventually, but nobody held much hope.

  “Fifty percent casualty rate… four trained operators went in, two of them died,” commented Travis. “Hellish place.”

  The same procedures were followed for the other kind of outliers, which also happened to mostly overlap with the first. They were the people who did not emerge frightened and broken but instead aching for more action. Those were the people who were like Michael and Travis.

  Except, there was only one such outlier, but his existence was important to know that there could be people like him in the wild, and that Candle Light needed to keep its eyes open. Bound by an oath, the Operator would be given plenty of opportunities to grow in power as well as a station befitting his power within the organization so that there was no risk he could turn against them. More long-term, they would need to think up different strategies or they risked making the dystopian world of might-makes-right a reality.

  After Michael was done with the teams, he quickly hopped into a car and made his way to Saint Hernest, the private hospital he had bought with his first batch of money. It wasn’t his primary source of revenue anymore, not with all that Unity was doing and especially not now that they could leverage the [Ghost Market] skill to sell literally anything they could get their hands on.

  However, the hospital was where Doctor Kavins and his crew worked while he waited for an actual lab to be completed at Site 00. He was working on developing possible drugs and procedures that mimicked the way healing magic worked, which could potentially be revolutionary. On top of being very lucrative, Michael thought, as Travis never failed to remind him.

  The doctor was quite invested in the research as well, and Michael found him there when he arrived at the hospital well into the night. They exchanged pleasantries as they passed corridor after corridor, rooms lit in dim light, rows of beds and ailing patients and hopeful families. Michael caught the doctor yawning right before he extended his aura to begin treating the patients, and offered to include the doctor in his aura to mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation.

  “Thank you,” said the man, “this magic is quite miraculous. I feel like I could go on like this for days.”

  “The effects fade after a while,” said Michael, “trust me, I tried. So, this was the regular batch. What about the others?”

  “I’ve arranged the more troublesome patients as instructed. Johanne sent me some rather detailed instructions on how to maximize your new area of effect.”

  Indeed, now that Michael could heal people in a 25-meter radius in every direction, they could play around with how the patients were placed on the various floors. The ones in need of more urgent care were placed closer to the center, while the others were placed radially outwards in order of priority. How the priority was calculated, Michael did not know. He knew it had to do with the gravity of the condition, with money the patient paid, and other factors like the need to create artificial scarcity to keep prices decently high.

  They weren’t a charity. Michael pushed for fair prices, but he recognized Travis’ point of view as valid, and he didn’t have many problems with milking rich people for all they had in exchange for life-saving treatments for them or their loved ones. They could afford it.

  After they were done healing the patients, Michael supplied the doctor with more mana crystals at his request so that research could proceed on an experimental vitality drug, and then he was once again in the car. This time, it was back to the dungeon to go over the last-minute preparations before meeting with the OA.

  “You could have gone to the hospital tomorrow,” Travis grunted, back at Site 00.

  “Nah,” Michael waved his argument away, “I needed some alone time—real-world alone time—to decompress, and I can sleep in the Valley afterwards. Now, speaking about important things.”

  “Are we talking about your latest leap in power?” the man supplied. “It’s like your whole existence has more weight to it now. You look more… real, even to my mundane senses.”

  Michael nodded, “how about now?”

  “It’s like you don’t even exist,” the man said, then grinned. “With this, our meeting with the OA can already be considered a success.”

  “Not so fast,” Michael said, “you have been awfully competent at dodging all forms of training in the dungeon. Travis, it’s time you ranked up to Silver.”

  The man sighed. “Before the meeting, yes, I get it.”

  “What’s the holdup? Want me to use my soothing fires on you?”

  Travis recoiled as if disgusted. “I have some pride, you know? I admit that the dungeon’s been having an effect on me, but I am no pussy. Let’s go.”

  As they walked towards the dungeon, forgoing the quad bikes as Travis’ subconscious tried a last-ditch attempt to delay the inevitable, the man asked Michael about what the process of ranking up entailed.

  “Who knows? Johanne claims it’s different for everyone.”

  “Did she rank up?”

  Michael shook his head.

  “Then how does she know?”

  “It’s part of her knowledge package given to her by the dungeon. Or her quote-unquote past life. She’s really bothered by it, you know?”

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “Why didn’t she rank up?” Travis pressed.

  Michael shrugged, “she says she wants to wait for the right moment. I think she is struggling with Qi for some reason.”

  “Right, not everyone can be as talented as you are.”

  “Sure they can. Just work hard. Besides, Qi is also giving me problems. Now listen: to rank up, I had to condense mana into my Skill Sanctum’s walls and consolidate my aura with Qi.”

  “I don’t even have a Skill Sanctum.”

  “Indeed,” Michael said, “that’s why it’s different for everyone, isn’t it? The only thing I know for sure is that higher ranks include higher energies. To go from Copper to Silver, you need to use Qi and bind it to your aura in some fashion. You have Silver-ranked Cards, so you have Qi.”

  The man frowned. “Don’t I need a manipulation ability?”

  “Touché,” Michael’s eyes lit up, “that’s what I thought as well. But then, when I trained my aura, I discovered something. Within its boundaries, you can do many things without the need for skills, cards, or other crutches. Copper auras are weak, barely able to levitate a couple of coins a few inches above your palms, but they can influence magic a bit more easily than they influence matter.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  “A few weeks.”

  “A few weeks?” Travis spat, “that’s a long time, man.”

  “I expect it will take you much longer, since you are a Copper. Worry not, we shall train your aura in combat. I have the feeling that adrenaline and the fear of death will make the process easier.”

  “You know what?” said Travis, clearly trying to psyche himself up. A flaming rifle appeared in his hands, a product of his latest Card. “Let’s fucking do it.”

  ***

  Travis emerged from the dungeon a changed man. Not only was he Silver-rank now, but he had spent more than five months of personal time inside the dungeon. It was as if the stress of life had vanished, only to slowly settle back onto his shoulders as he returned to the real world. Suddenly, he felt a couple of cravings he had not experienced in five months.

  Michael appeared only a few seconds after him. He checked the time, as Johanne had instructed him to: he had been inside for almost half an hour, and Michael for six seconds longer.

  “How long did you stay after I was gone?” he asked.

  “A day or so,” Michael said.

  Clearly, the Dungeon was beginning to struggle with the time-dilation effects. None of the soldiers had experienced such an effect, however, lending credit to the current theory that the problem was Michael’s stronger aura.

  With time the loss of the time dilation effect would begin to change the way they used the dungeon, but—and this was a sentiment he shared with Michael—it wasn’t all bad. Having a lessened effect on higher aura users effectively put a ceiling on the maximum power someone could amass in a short time window inside the dungeon.

  Another theory, which Michael would be working on confirming or disproving once he delved deeper into the dungeon, was that deeper floors offered better time dilation. They were richer in magic, and thus Johanne theorized that there the dungeon’s effect was stronger and much more able to handle strong auras. The issue, if such a theory happened to be correct, was that Michael was simply too strong for the shallow levels.

  In any case, Travis would let the geeks figure this stuff out, and then he would find a way to implement protocols to minimize any potential problems and maximize Candle Light’s gains. Speaking of gains, in the end, he ended up asking Michael to use his soothing flames on him, as it was the only way he could have survived months inside the dungeon with his sanity intact.

  It hurt his pride, but it was a small price to pay for power. Reaching Silver was worth more than this, but the fact made him think about other people. The dungeon was a place for the clinically insane, not to speak of the lengths he had to go through in order to upgrade his aura. He didn’t speak of it with Michael, but he was much more worried about other people gaining power now: there would be less of them, but they would all be totally crazy psychos. The path to power wasn’t simple. It wasn’t simple at all. If someone like him was struggling, and he had help, most people would never make it, but those who did…

  Silver. Travis was now officially the second-ever Silver-tier magic user that they knew of. He had new Cards, he had a powerful Aura he was beginning to understand how to control and use, and he felt stronger than ever. Truly, this was what Unity would soon offer to the whole of humanity, with him at the top, and he couldn’t wait for the day to come.

  There were a lot of things to be done before that day arrived, however. With a gentle nudge of his aura, he goaded his teleportation Card to activate. The Card had been with him since day one, and he thought he knew it like the back of his hand. He was wrong. Aura changed everything.

  The Card was flooded with Mana and Qi. There still was no manipulation Card in his hand deck, as they didn’t manage to get any monster or floor to drop it, but inside his aura he had some measure of control over the forces of the arcane. It was thanks to this ability that he managed to force the Card to teleport him farther away than ever, burning through his whole mana pool plus several Silver coins he had stashed in his pockets without the need to touch them. Another ability he learned thanks to his improved Aura control.

  He appeared at the edge of the current expansion of the dungeon’s Area of Influence. From his vantage point, he could see little pinpricks of light in the distance, like flickering, unmoving fireflies. They were what few lights were still on, this late at night, in the town of Redbud Ridge. It was a little island of civilization, encroached by the advancing woods, nature attempting to reclaim the city as it emptied itself of people, who in turn tried to escape from this hopeless hellhole in the middle of nowhere, rushing to the bigger cities.

  “Not for much longer,” he muttered. He—and by ‘he’ he meant Candle Light, and therefore Unity corporation—had plans for this city. It would be the stage where they tested their strategies before the time came when they had to employ them all throughout America and then the world.

  He squinted, activating one of his new Cards. It was like looking through multiple layers of reality at once, seeing heat signatures, electromagnetic fields, contours. All of it magnified several times over.

  The town was positively crawling with Candle Light “volunteers,” helping out the local populace while Unity was building new facilities there. A local market on the verge of bankruptcy had been bought, but instead of booting out the old owner, Unity offered him to work for them for more money than he’d ever seen. The crumbling buildings had been renovated and then Unity rented them to the good people of Redbud Ridge for much less than the market would demand. A thousand other little things were all going on.

  Perhaps too many. Perhaps the volunteers were a bit overkill. The people thought it too good to be true, and some were sowing mistrust. Well, this was just the prototype of how Unity would handle these things, and individuals causing a ruckus could be suppressed.

  Travis checked his watch. They did not have much time to prepare; the city was going to be swallowed up by the Area of Influence in a few hours if expansion continued regularly. Then the first anomalies would begin to pop up, and that’s what they needed the men there for.

  Build trust, put agents on the field, be ready for anything.

  With a muted flash of invisible lightning, Travis was back to his office at Site 00. He sighed in relief as his mana regeneration returned, realizing just how stifling the real world felt compared to the magic-rich air of the Site. It could be a problem, down the line. He didn’t remember feeling like this when he was but a Copper-rank. And of course, Michael had never mentioned feeling any distress: the man was a monster.

  “Let’s see… Trevor says we are ready to transfer some items from Area 51 over to Site 00. Amazing.”

  Crazy how fast things went when you had the right leverage. Now, all Candle Light had to do was show those stuck-ups from Area 51 that they could crack the nuts they hadn’t been able to crack. Then, slowly, Candle Light would worm its way into the CIA and the like, assuming more and more responsibilities on their behalf until they became so ingrained, so essential that the whole operation couldn’t function without them anymore.

  Many operations were not functioning well at all, Travis read in the report. Things were already out of hand. The only unknown variable was the OA which, being a whole different agency than any of the three-lettered ones, was a potentially different beast to tame. The OA had the real problematic items and anomalies, things that made Area 51 look like a playground for children.

  “They dangle the harmless stuff while the OA handles the real nightmares. Unacceptable. I want that to be us.”

  He flipped through yet another report. Unlike many would like to believe, he had more information about the OA than he let on, acquired through his less known networks and obscure ways. Contacts and favors that were once again becoming the currency of the world, a network that was growing big and fat thanks to Saint Hernest and Michael’s work there.

  The OA, it seemed, was having issues dealing with a chest-shaped object hidden in some dusty old basement.

  “That, plus Redbud Ridge at the same time? Well, looks like our newly powered Operators are going to see some action pretty soon.”

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