Chapter 107

By the time Michael was done with the day’s chores, night was rapidly approaching. Crazy to think that he didn’t even have time to do a single dungeon delve today, but that’s what happens when you are in over your head.

It’s simple to say, “Just take ten minutes for a quick delve, how can you not have ten minutes to spare?”, but reality is different. It reminded Michael of his teenage years when he would see office workers eating microwave meals at their desks and wonder why in the hell they didn’t prepare healthier food. Why didn’t they go for a walk? They had a whole hour to do so before they had to resume work.

Then he started working himself and realized that a human’s body doesn't run on wishes and good resolutions. After he got magic and stats, things didn’t change all that much. Sure, he could work non-stop and not even feel mental fatigue, but this just meant that he would work more and not have more free time. In the end, he was forced to go back home disappointed, slumping on his sofa.

“I could technically go now, I don’t really need sleep, but…” Michael trailed off.

Maggie, who was sitting on a chair by the kitchenette table reading, hummed. “I know you are trying to spend more time with me, Mikey, and I really appreciate it, but you can go if you want. I’ll be here after you come back.”

Michael shook his head. “No,” he said, “sleep is just a reminder, a silly little ritual like working out every morning. I don’t strictly need to any of that, now that I have magic.”

Getting up from the sofa, he started pacing around the room. “You know, when I’m in the dungeon, in the valley especially, I get this urge to just stop wasting time on all this stuff. Why sleep when I don’t need to? Why work out every morning? Why even come out, back in the real world at all? I could spend a few decades in there and come back a god. But then I banish those thoughts, because I feel like if I gave in to the urge, if I started making exceptions and breaking my own rules, I would drift farther and farther away from humanity.”

His pacing around the room brought him to the window, from where he could see the trail leading to the entrance of the dungeon. The Time element that suffused the magical cave was visible from here, easily within his grasp.

“I could master the element of Time, and buy myself infinite hours in the day. It would take however many years in the Valley, but it would be what? No more than a few days in the real world. Why not do that?” he shook his head, chuckling to himself. “No. I don’t think I can spend years in the valley and come out unchanged. I overheard people talking about me, you know. Calling me insane or crazy. I don’t think I am, though. I’m just different than them in some things. Perhaps you could call me the ‘good kind’ of crazy. Do you think I am the good kind of crazy?”

Maggie shrugged. At least she wasn’t intimidated by him. “I don’t really get it. I see you and Johanne and all the others doing all sorts of wonderful things, but I feel like I’m just a lost little girl. I ask myself, will I ever be as cool and strong as them? But then I think back at what happened with…with…”

She started sobbing. Michael quickly got up and wrapped her in a hug. “Shh,” he consoled her, “you’re safe now.”

“I feel so alone, Michael…” she murmured, “I want to go back to normal, even though I know it’s not possible.”

Michael said nothing for a while. Later that night, while his sister slept, he found himself pacing around the compound. It was close to the middle of August, and it was hot and humid. Had it not been for Michael’s aura and the Ice element he could now lace it with, he would have been sweating bullets. The more he used it, the closer he felt to integrating the element with the aura itself, although there was still some sort of block he was failing to overcome.

The same went for his relationships. Talking with his sister got him thinking, which was what led him to pacing around rather than sleeping. His relationships with other people were abnormal. Save for his sister, all he had were Travis, Old Dave, and Johanne. The first was a former CEO who had been turned to his cause, the second was his mentor, and the third was a woman rescued from the dungeon who now called him her lord.

Then there was Drullkrin, who was a monster and also insisted that Michael was his superior in every way. Anyone else was either his underling or worked for him. Save for his sister, he had no normal people around him.

He pulled out his phone and sent two text messages. One to his old university friend group, from back before he was forced to drop out due to money issues. Back then, he had convinced himself that he was too stupid to pass any of the classes, but thinking about it now, he could see that it had been a mix of several factors that led him to dropping out of school. Perhaps enrolling hadn’t been a good idea in the first place, but he had made good friends there.

Being late in the night, there was no reply to his text. The group chat was more dead than alive these days, with most of the friends who made up the group now living far from each other. Michael thought about offering to pay for their flights, but decided to wait and see what they replied to his text with first.

The second message was to his sensei, Stephan, following up on his invite to grab dinner together to catch up. While not a normal friendship per se, the fact that Stephan insisted he not be dragged into Michael’s magical circus meant that Stephan was among the most normal people around Michael right now—a valuable thing to keep him grounded.

With that out of the way, his thoughts gravitated back to his little sister. She felt stifled in here, surrounded by wondrous things she couldn’t help but find scary. She had been healed of most of her trauma with the use of magic, but these things took time. What she needed was some normalcy. But how to offer her normalcy without putting her in a position of danger? Anyone in the know would see her as a giant target to get to Michael, and unlike his parents, he couldn’t put her in a gilded prison and just not care about how she felt about it.

“Icarus, let’s brainstorm some ideas,” Michael said into his phone.

The AI happily complied. By the time dawn was painting the far hills red, a rough outline of an idea had formed. Michael eventually wanted schools for Site 00’s residents, right? And he also wanted scientists and researchers who could work for him. Why not teach them here, maybe?

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Why not build a university here?

Perhaps not too close to the mana cloud, but still within the property. With them buying the neighboring land, the property was getting rather huge. There was space for everything.

Many things could go wrong, but he didn’t care. A school would offer him and his sister mundane problems to focus on, an escape from the daily grind of magic. With a resolute nod, he ordered Icarus to set plans in motion. The AI couldn’t yet act on the real world, but it was an excellent tool to relay messages to the relevant people. It could remember the whole conversation and was integrated into the phones of everyone within Unity, meaning it knew who to call better than Michael ever would.

Stephan was the first to respond to his messages. Working at the dojo was not his main source of income; he also had a real job for which he woke up early every morning. Unknown to him, Michael had purchased the whole thing and was now his boss’s boss, which meant that—very unexpectedly—Stephan received a message telling him to take the day off due to some unforeseen problems at work.

Perplexed, he told as much to Michael, and the two found themselves back at the park for some morning sparring. They would get lunch later, after they had worked up an appetite.

“It felt like hitting a brick wall before,” Stephan stated, massaging his hand, “but now it’s like I am daring to hit something that I shouldn’t even consider hitting.”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” Michael replied. “It’s called Aura Suppression. Comes with the level.”

“It’s like I don’t even know you anymore,” Stephan commented after doing a couple of katas just to take some time to think. “I don’t know how to say it without hurting your feelings, man. It’s like you are becoming something completely different. A bit alien, maybe. Surely, you are not the same person that you were a few weeks ago. How can you change so much in so little time? I know about the Dungeon, but it doesn’t feel…doesn’t feel normal, you know?”

Later, after lunch, Michael drove them to an abandoned quarry up in the mountains, claiming that if Stephan really wanted to know what had happened that had changed Michael so much, he would only tell him where they were safe enough to speak. The overgrown, abandoned quarry had been flooded, and a small, stagnating lake had formed in the middle.

“Aren’t we trespassing?” Stephan asked, worried about the sign he saw at the entrance where a rusty chain that blocked the way had been removed by Michael’s brute strength.

“Nah,” Michael shrugged. “It will be mine soon enough. Just ordered my men to buy the whole property.”

Stephan nodded. Suddenly, Michael pulled fishing rods out of his car’s trunk.

“Did you have them in the car the whole time?”

Michael shrugged, pulling out a refrigerator that ran on Elemental stones and a few other things. “I have been told fishing calms the mind. And it’s a good excuse to chat.”

Stephan looked like he wanted to say something, but a single look from Michael made him rethink what he was about to say. Michael found it odd at first, but a hunch told him to examine his own face, and, true enough, he found it dark and brooding when he looked at it in the car window’s reflection. A faint trace of aura was leaking out of him as he thought about how to approach the topic he wanted to talk to Stephan about.

He realized, with no little amount of worry, that Stephan was scared of him. That’s why he was agreeing to his inane demands.

I brought him out here just to fish, without even asking him if he was okay with it or if he had other things to do. I manipulated him—or Icarus did—to make sure he didn’t have to work today just so I could take him around like he was my property.

He tried to put the man at ease, but as he carried the equipment to the shore in silence, he found the tension rising instead. He just didn’t know what to say or do. Travis wasn’t intimidated by him in the slightest, and he could be himself around the man. Why was Stephan, a trained martial artist, not the same?

Michael just set everything down and sat on the reclinable chair. Stephan followed him mechanically. There were flies buzzing around, and the smell of the water was unpleasant. There were fish in there, though, he had been ensured of it.

Pulling one out revealed a dying, sick fish. Now, asking Icarus, he realized that the AI had had someone come over to the property and dump fish in the stale water just to make sure Michael wouldn’t be forced to change his plans.

He sighed. To make matters worse, the smell was very bad, and the flies were very annoying. While they couldn’t penetrate his skin, he could see that they were bothering Stephan.

“Fucking hell,” he muttered to himself, flaring his aura. Within moments, the air became free of the annoying mosquitoes, and the smell was gone.

“Thanks,” Stephan said uneasily. “So…” he began, “what did you want to talk to me about?”

“I feel like I’m losing my grip on reality,” Michael admitted. “As if I am not living in the real world anymore. The more powerful I get, the more…strange everything becomes. My every movement causes ripples through the world. If a normal person is a pebble, causing tiny ripples, then I’m a landslide. Wherever I go, I risk causing trouble.”

Stephan just looked at him.

“See? What I’m saying doesn’t make any sense to you, does it?” he asked.

“Not really,” Stephan responded.

“That’s how I feel when I go out in the world. Out here, it is stifling, like I’m wading through mud. There’s no refreshing mana in the air. Everything I do, every little movement or emotion that pops up in my mind…they all have consequences. You are feeling it, aren’t you? I can see you are uneasy.”

“That’s an understatement. I feel like I’m sitting next to a tiger. Or a bear. A dangerous bear. My instincts are telling me to get the fuck out of here, Michael.”

Michael nodded slowly. With a sigh, he pulled out a bottle and two little glasses. Pouring himself one, he offered the other to Stephan.

“You want one?” he inquired.

Stephan looked at the glass for a while. “No, thank you,” he declined. “Quite too early for me.”

“Yeah,” Michael agreed. “I just needed a little help here.”

“I understand,” Stephan said condescendingly. The truth was that he didn’t approve, Michael thought.

“I’m just, you know?” Michael struggled to put into words how he was feeling. “Removed from the world. These days, I don’t feel at home no matter where I go. Perhaps the only times I feel alright are when I’m in the dungeon. What does that make me?”

“I can’t begin to understand, you know that, right?” Stephan replied.

“That’s part of the problem. I never thought being at the top would feel so lonely. I can have it all, you know? And it matters to me, too. It just feels so impersonal, so removed. As if I was watching a movie and wanted the main character to be a good guy, just because that’s the right thing to do. I feel like my own life is a movie of it, not a life.”

Michael poured another shot and downed it.

“Does it help?” Stephan asked, nodding at the empty glass.

“Not really. Listen, Stephan…I killed. I would like to say that I only killed once and it was in self-defense but…” he trailed off. “Then I did it again, you know? And it wasn’t in self-defense anymore. It was to eliminate a threat. Then I did it again. This time? It was revenge. It was punishment. I killed a man for revenge and tortured another to protect what I built and the people I loved.”

Stephan said nothing for a long time. Then, he got up, tugging on his fishing rod. The water around them was crystal clear, and there was a clear demarcation line where it became dirty again. Looking at it, Stephan looked like he understood something.

“You feel adrift,” Stephan observed. “You are looking for connections, to ground yourself. But normal people, us, we can’t really give it to you, can we? We can make you feel normal for a while, maybe, then it’s back to feeling out of place.”

“Maybe,” Michael conceded. “I texted my old friends. I hope I can go out with them and feel normal.”

“You won’t,” Stephan stated. “You won’t, but it’s good you try. Alright, I see what needs to be done. Take me to this Site 00. If you can’t relate with normal people, and you can’t really build the friendships you need with the people you have there ‘cause it’s always work and work and work…lift a normal person up to your level.”

“You would do that for me?” Michael questioned, hope flickering in his eyes.

“I will think about it. I’m not saying I will do it. I want to see what is going on over there first.”

“Thank you,” Michael expressed sincerely. “It means a lot to me.”