Cael sat up and started his morning the way everyone should.

With a string of expletives that could make an old sailor blush.

“What happened to my leg?!” Everything was in some form pain or another, but the most pressing and worrying would have to be the image Tar sent him of a clean cut that sliced through half his left thigh.

If he considered along with the definitely broken rib on his right side, Cael couldn’t imagine moving anywhere anytime soon. At least, not very quickly.

‘When you jumped out of the tunnel, the Lancer tried to grab you. I’d say it’s better that its claws were too sharp to actually hold on.’ Right. Swarm Lancer. Cael hadn’t really thought about it, but ‘Swarm’ very heavily implied that there were a lot more where that came from.

“How do you know that?” Cael closed his eyes and just laid still. It didn’t hurt that bad if he just didn’t move.

‘I can share all your senses with enough effort. I think you were too busy trying to live, but I felt that.’

The changeling took a deep breath and frowned at the throbbing in his side. Maybe shallower breaths would be better. Especially with that odor. Something in the room smelled like it was in the process of decomposing. He wasn’t sure what, though. It was too dark to see anything.

‘It does smell pretty bad.’

“Well, I’d rather be stuck with this smell than move right now. Hey, System, is there anything I should be aware of?”

Cael

General Information

Attributes

Age

4 days

VIT

3

PER

3

Health

18/30

STR

2

INT

7

Mana

70/70

END

2

FOC

7

Stamina

20/20

DEX

2

LCK

0

Effects

Spellbound, Bleeding (Minor)

AGI

2

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“[Health] is looking better than I had hoped.”

“What are you talking about? Being over a third of the way dead is reason for concern.” That… made a lot of sense. In a game, this wasn’t too bad, but in a real-life scenario, he was almost half dead. It was a little unnerving to be assessing his health with numbers. It almost didn’t feel real.

“Well, I didn’t say it was great. Ava, what happened back there?”

“I should start by saying this is definitely a dungeon. What happened is that we hit the border. It is quite surreal to find myself as part of an Instance type dungeon, but it makes sense in retrospect.”

“Instance dungeon?”

“It’s a type of dungeon recreated by the System based on events that occurred at another time and place. Another Instance. Of course, while this can be categorized as a dungeon, your initial report of Tier one was a bit off. Based on enemy count and average levels, it would be Tier eleven.”

Cael frowned. “Level five hundred?” That was a little out of his range.

“Yes. Around ‘five hundred' levels out of your range. Back to your question. I hit the dungeon border and was forced to dive. The-”

“Dive? We’re moving? Wait, what exactly are you?”

“This isn’t working. You keep interrupting me.” Ava sounded mildly exasperated as she sent him a dense thought. A memory?

‘Whoa. Cael, you should take a look too.’ The elemental reported back.

“How do I-” He brushed against it with his consciousness and was sucked into it by force.

:{|}:{|}:{|}:

Ava took potshots at the pursuing Swarm. Each shot was excessively powerful, but that was the point. If even one specimen survived, the Swarm would be able to evolve resistances against her weapons.

Well. They were already doing that. It was just going slower without any survivors.

Currently, Ava was using a set of mana turrets that fired concentrated death mana, but they were growing less effective already. Soon she would have to swap back to fire bolts.

It was practically a tradition at this point. A palate cleanser of sorts that she liked to employ before she revealed her newest weapons. In this case, a lattice of void mana that would dice everything it came into contact with. At least, that was the idea. It wasn’t finished yet. Recently, the Swarm was evolving just a bit too quickly to keep up with.

Even with a nearly endless mana reserve, Ava was struggling to find materials that could comfortably handle the levels of energy she required. She would have to orbit another planet soon to extract metals, but that meant leaving the Swarm alone. Despite the dearth of organic matter, it always seemed capable enough of replenishing its numbers. Each time she stopped to replenish her resources, the Swarm’s numbers climbed higher too.

Like overpopulation, it was slowly becoming unmanageable. The kind of exponential growth that her advances in runic research couldn’t quite keep up with. And that was only if you didn’t factor in the adaptive mutation. Ava simply didn’t have the ability to exterminate this pest.

She wondered if it was even worth it. The changeling had proposed the idea that none of this was even real. She found herself longing for it to be true. If only so that she could be absolved of all this responsibility.

A divine mission from the God of Machines. Her creator.

Ava was made an unwilling participant in a game played by the gods.

Her opponent? An undying Swarm created by the God of Monsters.

What a shit hand she'd been dealt.

If this was a dungeon, then all of this must have already happened. And Ava wasn’t blind. Unless she managed an impossible breakthrough, she was stuck. Fighting a losing battle against an enemy that she could never kill.

Eventually, she wouldn’t be able to harm them at all. Or more likely, they would one day grow fast enough to catch her. Already, they were too close for comfort.

Ava’s only solace lay in the fact that their battle was held in the endless space between worlds. So long as she remained moving in a straight line, they could never catch her. Not yet anyway.

Her detection servers pinged and a command was automatically sent to navigation and extermination. All of her servers buzzed with calculations.

Oddly, even though it was technically her who had sent the command, she wasn’t quite sure what it was. Her role had grown so repetitive in recent decades that she had long since automated many of her own functions.

Ava traced the command line to its origin.

Server 4: Detection- Subsection 29: Dimensional mana.

She was vaguely aware that she was changing course. Ava’s frame groaned under the pressure of altering her momentum so acutely. She wasn’t built to change directions like this.

Just as she started to slow, the Swarm caught up.

The full force of extermination sprung to life. All along her surface, weapons of all mana aspects were activated. In total, nearly a thousand projectiles were launched instantly and over a hundred reactive shields flickered to life.

Ava’s first volley practically set the fabric of space alight in her surroundings. Of course, the mana pathways immediately began to evaporate under the energy strain, but it had done its job in eliminating the first wave of the Swarm.

But that just meant the fastest and least armored ones. The more sturdy types would have been able to weather that volley. There was a reason Ava didn’t use many of these weapons anymore.

The shields remained active despite the state of her mana pathways. She’d wisely chosen to give each a battery of its own.

The only problem was that she was still moving too slowly. She’d barely succeeded in the course change and hadn’t had the time to accelerate yet.

Overall, the Swarm had eight distinct speeds or waves. As their speed dropped, their armor levels spiked sharply.

Ava couldn’t let the fifth wave reach her.

Past the third wave, the Swarm’s armors and resistances became more resilient than her own hull. She would be hard-pressed to remove any fourth-wave enemies that penetrated her shields. Fifth-wave Swarm types might be able to actually kill her.

She dropped energy output to her weapons and focused all excess mana into enhancing the metal elementals running repairs on the overdrawn weapons systems. If her guns were offline by the time the fourth wave arrived, she was screwed.

But why was she turning? There was absolutely no reason she should be turning.

Ava switched her attention to the detection logs for a moment. The anomaly was easy enough to spot. It was a mana void. All energy that flowed past a certain point in front of her simply ceased to exist.

It really was a dungeon. And that meant Ava would also cease to exist if she hit that wall.

Ava had to admit. That was a pretty good reason to be turning.