Robert had a map of all the known islands in this realm. In the liminal void where the haze didn't obscure the remaining, he could see the explorers hadn't visited even ten percent of them.
Since the glider platforms were what kept the puffblooms from visiting the explored area, Robert went around and systematically destroyed these platforms. Decades of work by teams of people lost in a single day.
But someone with a map could still figure out the launch spots. Robert carved crescent-shaped inlets where the launch pads were. To dash any hopes of navigating through this place, he erased the second islands that people would aim at. Those insane enough to attempt the flight wouldn't find their target island and hopelessly glide until the time they died.
Signs stating that the Puffbloom Islands were private property and that trespassers should GTFO were placed in front of each passage.
He could only hope the puffblooms would stop avoiding the explored islands now.
Nothing stopped dedicated trespassers from doing the same as the original explorers did but that would be an enormous waste of resources in a realm that was allegedly dead.
A quick check on the Gravity Slime Caverns showed it was slowly recovering. It would take years to return to where it was and the water monsters would never return unless some eggs survived by some miracle.
During the day, he had a prophetic vision. A city in flames was the first step in his path to freedom.
With his sanctum as secure as he could make it, Robert returned to Earth.
*
*
Bosstown, Empire of America
* *
Robert cleared the American Undead Revolution dungeon again. He got an old oil lamp, which was a good reward if compared to what this hellhole had to offer. But the undead gave good Aura gains, Robert wasn't complaining. Leaving the portal, it became dull and translucid, signaling nobody could enter for the next twenty-four hours.
The spotters for the criminal gangs jumped and drew their weapons as they saw him leaving. "Who are you?" They shouted.
"I'm Robert Blaze, the Imperial Academy tournament champion," Robert said.
These guys were all small fry, bottom-of-the-barrel one-star goons who were tasked with the shitty job of watching one another prevent the other gangs from doing anything to the Dungeon.
"Who?" One asked, and they all scratched their heads.
One of them ran upstairs. Robert let him. Perhaps they've spent too much time down here. Robert sighed. Taking a deep breath, he shouted.
"SAMSON SECURITY, CEASE YOUR AGGRESSION!"
It was like the proverbial light bulb alighted inside their pea-sized brains. "Oh, you are THAT guy!"
"Damn, I tried to get the shirt but it was all sold out."
"Hey, can you give me your autograph? For my daughter. Definitely not to sell online, no, sir!"
"Guys. Isn't that dude the one with the ten billion dollar bounty on his head?"
Silence.
"Who?"
Heads were scratched.
"Him! I saw his mugshot on a bulletin board!"
"Bullshit."
"Not!"
"Why don't we ask him?"
"Hey, dude. Do you have a ten billion bounty on your head?"
"Yeah. Shouldn't you guys go and report to your bosses that some intruder messed up with the Dungeon?"
"Jake already went. And Jake has lips looser than a whore fisting a watermelon."
"Isn't the saying a whore getting fisted by—"
"Hey, shut up."
Minutes of banter later, Jake returned with some enforcers. "It's him, it's him! The guy in the wanted poster!" Jake shouted and pointed at Robert.
Robert waved at them. "Morning! Nice day for fishing, ain't it? Eh-heh!"
The enforcers froze. Meeting a bloodthirsty guy wearing battered armor and a dented sword, swearing to tear into their mothers' guts was one thing. A friendly guy, wearing fancy, clean clothes, coming out of America's butthole Dungeon, no weapons drawn, and looking like a posh college student was another thing entirely. The only thing worse than that would be a young bespectacled girl carrying a book on astrophysics too big or too heavy for such a tiny tyke.
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"Are you the guy with the ten billion bounty?" An enforcer asked from the stairs.
"He's the shirt guy!" One of the goons shouted.
"They're one and the same," another enforcer said. "What do you want?"
"I want to talk to your boss," Robert replied.
"What if the boss is busy? He likes his beauty sleep."
"Then I'll have to show him the value of keeping an open schedule and working out in the early morning. And then you won't have a boss anymore."
"Eh... Did he threaten to kill the boss?"
"Most likely. But I agree that working out in the early morning is the best. Gets your heart pumping and full of energy for the day, see?"
"Look, if you guys don't want to tell me where the boss is," Robert said. "It's no problem. I can just rip the information out of your brains."
The enforcers flinched.
"Can you do that?" One of the goons asked.
"Wanna fuck around and find out? Or just take me to your boss and maybe I won't make you believe you are Janhalar Kraven's lost daughter?" Robert asked with a scowl. He pointed at the ugliest goon in the room. "I'll even make you madly in love with that guy there."
They decided to escort him to their gang's boss. The goons belonging to the other gangs scurried away. The Dungeon was in lockdown for twenty-four hours anyway.
*
*
The walk down Bosstown's ghetto was a tense one. Robert represented an offer of inconceivable wealth and unsurpassed violence. He walked with firm and confident steps. Any sign of weakness would make these craven, greedy punks try their luck even though they knew Mr. Eastwood's metaphorical revolver only fired five times. Word spread like wildfire. Expensive long-range communication crystals and Archs specialized in breaching vast distances with their thoughts sent the news far and wide.
It was only a matter of time. How fast could a bounty hunter cross the distance? How many were rushing down passage realms, taking a scorpion-hopping shortcut beneath the world like an 8-bit jungle explorer in search of treasure before their 20 minutes expired?
To every civilian he saw on the streets, he sent this silent message, "Get your loved ones and flee this place. It's about to become a bloodbath."
He had no choice. With a worldwide shitstorm brewing with him as the target, his only hope was to raise the stakes. He doubted he could just hunker down and weather the storm. Well-motivated people with the right magic could find and reach him anywhere.
The portals started to open, sending ripples of Space essence in all directions. One, six, twenty. Robert's spatial senses were distorted as the breaches, in reality, reached a local maximum. Those too late for the party found their portals unstable, and dangerous. Some tried and were either lost, deformed, or just cut in half.
The stable portals started to pour people. Bounty hunters from all over the globe. Robert shielded himself in a bubble of fuzzy distorted space meant to normalize the outside influence and keep the inside relatively more stable. Similar to how several light sources would make the shadows cast by each of them weaker.
When his prescience shouted danger, Robert engaged his main talent. He didn't linger in the liminal void, diving deeper into the true void and escaping to the other side of the world.
*
*
Tokyo-4, The Rising Sun Theocracy.
* *
During the rift cataclysm, cruel angels had destroyed the previous three iterations of the city and no amount of spandex-wearing teenager angst could save them. He spent a couple of hours shopping in the many malls dotting the city, some hard-to-find stuff in the Occident, some souvenirs, and a lot of exotic food. He even bought a licensed, official die-cast chrome figurine of his Minotaur armor in the famous punching pose.
Incognito this time, Robert went to a bar and tossed a hundred thousand neo-yen to the bartender.
"Give me a large macchiato. I'd like to watch the world news," He said in fluent Japanese. "And keep the rest on my tab."
The bartender changed the TV channel from a boring baseball game to global news. A reporter appeared with breaking news about the chaos in Bosstown's slums. Robert bet that among these bounty hunters, some groups had a lot of bad blood between them and would attack each other on sight. If not bad blood, greed. Whittle the competition, loot some good shit from the guys on the other side, or just for the glory.
Mostly for the loot. Yeah. Bosstown was still a major trade hub and these foreigners weren't as concerned about law enforcement as the locals. The local gangs and organizations didn't take the invasion lying down. The fighting was intense. Robert was sure that the real professionals noticed his absence. Tracking him all the way to good old Japan? That was another thing entirely.
The city's powerhouses had to intervene. That's when the hunters turned thieves knew their luck had run out. Most were crushed but a few managed to run away.
Someone with a flying talent or an Ethertech drone had aerial footage of the fight. Entire city blocks burned. Hundreds of bodies littered the streets, most of them wearing delving gear.
Robert finished his coffee and vanished. His job was only starting.
He made appearances in most major cities of the world. He sent messages to underworld informants telling where he'd be in the next hour. Minor skirmishes happened but not to the extent of what went down in Bosstown.
Trust in the information networks diminished. People weren't as eager to spend the resources to go after Robert Blaze's sightings. Some even started to question the bounty's validity, writing it off as a ploy to attack and weaken their community.
With that, the weak, the dumb, and the uninformed were all pushed out of the picture. Some of the strong, smart, and well-prepared were warier of trickery, pondering if the bounty was worthy enough to warrant the risk.
The crux of the issue was the potion. Its market value was in the low billions but its allure to two-star assassins and bounty hunters was unmatched. Since no three-star version of the potion existed outside of urban legend, the bounty had much less appeal to them.
*
*
Instead of going back to Earth, Robert appeared in the Maze Corridors passage realm. The ever-shifting tunnels led to more realms than any other known to man. In his last visit, Robert had mapped over seventy passages. This time, he dedicated a whole day to finding them all. With ninety-nine days to finish the task and no passengers to slow him down, Robert zipped down the corridors, took shortcuts through the true void, and marked all the passage halls on his map.
Though the tunnels changed all the time for several reasons, the passage halls housing a portal never changed relative position. With his talent granting long-range interdimensional teleportation, the moment he found a passage hallway, the realm it connected to was open to him. He finished mapping the whole realm. It had 496 halls, which was a perfect number. The sum of all its divisors except itself was 496.
It hinted at many truths of the interspace but Robert didn't care about these. Not when his survival was at stake.
In his mind palace, he matched the murals on the passage halls with what he knew about the cataloged realms. He took note of hundreds of realms no human had ever set foot on. And others that could be the key to getting to the places he needed to go. Once he exhausted his findings, he dedicated more work to his imprint.
Once his 99 days were over, he checked some of these halls to find the passages to realms he needed to visit. Once he found what he needed, he set off.
All this dead or dead-er bounty put him behind schedule. Robert had to rush or he wouldn't finish all his quests before the summer vacation was over.