Oliver had once had the opportunity to experience white torture during a training exercise. A form of psychological torture, it involves placing the captive in a white room and leaving them there, deprived of all stimulation, until they go crazy from the lack of input.

It was a violation of human rights, horribly illegal, and, well, just horrible.

Oliver had experienced it for what had felt like close to twelve hours, with nothing to do but wait for the time to pass. When they let him out, they told him it had been about two hours, but they could have told him it had been a full day and he would have believed them.

Within a matter of minutes of entering into complete darkness, he realized that this was worse. Far worse.

There was nothing he needed to do, or even could do. He didn't need to eat, or sleep, and he couldn't go to the bathroom. If it weren't for the System, he would have given up almost immediately and gone to his death convinced it was the better option.

The first thing Oliver did was summon it and set it to track the passage of time. Though he could not track the passage of outside time to construct a ratio, he was confident that such a ratio would have been meaningless anyway. Once light started doing funny things, normal ideas about time sort of stopped being relevant. No, it was more of a reassurance for him, a way to orient himself, to know that time truly was passing, and a way to distract himself.

But by the twelve hour mark, once he'd realized the archmage's secret, he was itching to cancel the spell and launch a counterattack on him. Anything was preferable to this interminable, silent, lonely wait in the dark with what could only be a quick and violent conclusion one way or the other.

The trouble with that was that if the attack didn't work, the archmage would probably decide he was too much of a threat to be allowed to live, or at least go System-free, and either immediately kill him or disable his System.

No, he had precisely one shot at this, and he had to get it right the first time. That meant he had to be able to prove his conjecture beyond a shadow of doubt, and then come up with a surefire plan to get around the archmage's wards and take advantage of the weaknesses it came with.

So instead, he resolved to wait until he was ready, plan out his attack, come up with contingencies, and take full advantage of all the time he could. The Second Wind spell would run its course; although he could bend it, he couldn't divert it from its true purpose, and once all the damage to his brain had been repaired, it would automatically cease, snapping back into the real world.

He wanted to make the most of the advantage it conferred until then, and he wasn't going to give up because he couldn't handle a little boredom.

—

When the hallucinations started, he was understandably distracted at first. It's a known fact that in the absence of sensory input the mind will actually hallucinate, because it operates by extrapolating data from the input it receives, and if it gets only a little or no input, its extrapolations are wildly off.

The problem was, Oliver reflected, we don't realize how much sensory input there is in the world around us. Even in the quietest place we can find, there's always something going on. When it was quiet enough, Oliver had always been able to, at the very least, hear his own heartbeat and the passage of air through his chest.

In here, there wasn't even that. It was true silence, akin to the silence of space, a silence no human has ever truly heard. He was making all kinds of records today. He wondered if Guinness would take his word for it.

First human to see X-rays. First human to listen to the sound of silence. First human to lose their grip on reality in less than a day?

It was for the sake of his own sanity, and absolutely not at all just for entertainment, that before he devised the full extent of his counterattack, he abused a quirk of the System.

If it could make sounds, could replicate the sound that the turning of a page made — as it had with his Dungeons and Dragons player's handbook, surely it could replicate other sounds from his memory as well.

Sounds the System could play into his mind to fill the void caused by the absence of stimuli and quiet his mind, thereby allowing him to focus.

Sounds like Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees, released in 1977 and reproduced in the highest possible fidelity by a Goldring/Lenco GL75 record player pushing tunes through his father's old Wharfedale Linton Heritage sound system. A song he'd listened to scores, probably hundreds of times.

Upon reflection, and after a particularly harrowing period where the auditory hallucinations resolved into what could have possibly been the sound of screams in the distance, he informed his System in no uncertain terms that this would be possible.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Carefully, Oliver visualized the way his interface would expand to include a Music column. With scarcely any effort at all, the System helpfully obliged, the rush of blood to the head and kaleidoscope of lights that he hadn't seen for so long coming back easier than ever before, and staying for a troublingly long time.

He'd begun to think he'd made a serious mistake making a modification to the System in this headspace (officially both his literal and metaphorical term for it), when it finally began to die down. When it settled, nothing had changed, except the addition of two columns in his spreadsheet: Songs, which was simply an atrociously long list of what was perhaps every song he'd ever heard, and a cell titled Currently Playing.

And there was one more little option that hadn't been there before: a speaker icon. Currently, it was ticked off. Hm. Interesting.

He scanned the list for several minutes until he found the song he was looking for, then copy and pasted it with a couple of mental flexes into the Currently Playing column.

And then, in glorious high fidelity, Barry Gibb belting out the lyrics of Stayin' Alive in his trademark falsetto shattered the silence and dispelled the auditory illusions plaguing him.

Blinking along happily to the tune (for he could do nothing else), Oliver reviewed the facts, and then his hypothesis, taking the time to jot them down into a new sheet in his system for clearer analysis.

Facts:

1. The archmage was impervious to physical damage most of the time, but sometimes allowed spell effects and physical effects to pass through his physical form.

2. That physical form, then, was an illusion of some kind. Explained the cape not respecting gravity.

3. Mana couldn't travel far. He was close by, then, but not there, exactly.

4. He could bend space in some way; the shield he created to defend against the dragon had created a warp in reality. There was a chance that it had been some sort of creation and then destruction of some sort of material with a unique refraction index, but materialization of pure matter would have been cost-prohibitive even if you had nearly unlimited mana. And though the archmage was powerful, he was no god. So naturally, that meant he was just twisting the structure of the space-time continuum instead. Magic was weird.

5. Alloman was there, but not there; his physical body, then, could only be located in a pocket dimension, like the one afforded by a spatial storage ring.

6. There had to be some kind of connection to the physical world that let him convey himself and maintain interactions with it. That was the primary problem with the storage ring: if you got inside of it, you couldn't move it around. It seemed like Alloman had solved that, to the benefit of his reputation.

7. He was still able to interact with the outside world as if his body was fully present; that would have to be by means of force spells, similar to what they'd done at the Range.

8. He still had to breath; the Earthlings' ability to create air within the spacial storage rings was, as far as Oliver knew, unique. Nobody quite knew how to create air from scratch here.

9. He hadn't been harmed by the flashbang, or the nerve gas; therefore, the passage of air and light through this hole were filtered in some way, perhaps a sort of custom-tailored force ward fitted over the hole.

Conclusion: the archmage was standing in a pocket dimension, projecting a physical image of himself out into the world via an illusion spell (by redirecting the light, or something), and casting force and shield spells to simulate his physical presence.

And, most importantly, there had to be a hole where his reality met the physical one.

The illusion of invincibility was a potent one. It'd head off most engagements before they even began — if you couldn't even hit somebody, why would you start a fight with them?

It neatly explained the legends told of the man; Oliver would have never seen through it had they not already developed their own similar system with the Range's illusion chamber. But they hadn't thought to take it so far.

But the necessity of a portal between the home plane and his own pocket dimension explained why he went to the trouble of putting up shields at all; if you wanted to defend a particular unremarkable small spot that was your sole point of connection to the outer world, you'd pretend that there was a lot more to defend, and hence a lot more for your enemies to target.

The obvious solution was the nuclear option: figure out where that hole was, and unload all they had on it. And since Alloman was mostly existing in a pocket dimension, that… expanded their options.

Specifically, it made Oliver's nomenclature of the nuclear option both metaphorical and literal.

The fission spell was the natural culmination of a partnership between Oliver, Gideon, and Sung Lee into investigating the uses that transformation of materials — alchemy — could be put to. Gideon and Sung had shouted him down, but Oliver's argument, that it was better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it, had prevailed, ultimately.

The issue was, it was basically a suicidal spell. The mana required to cast it meant you had to be within at least thirty or forty feet to pull it off. They had transmuted the required uranium isotope, could fabricate the additional materials, the technical parts of it were no challenge. But none of them wanted to cast it, given the two requirements for casting it were both the death of the caster and the massive amount of widespread devastation that could be its only object.

But the situation was different here.

If the nuclear reaction occurred in a different dimension, well, it would be safely contained, with the natural exception of any emissions from the hole between dimensions. Altogether, the products of the spell would be much less dangerous and certainly less suicidal than casting it in open air.

It was possibly the least practical way anybody had ever thought of using a nuclear bomb, but it was also the one way Oliver currently had of being absolutely certain that the mage was dead.

The problems with it were twofold: if something about his understanding of the pocket dimension were off, or if he failed to direct the spell properly through the hole joining the two dimensions, the results would be so catastrophic that he'd never have the time to realize his mistake. And the mage would probably walk away unharmed.

That still left the matter of uncovering the hole and breaking the ward placed on it. That…

…Oliver had no idea how to do that.