Chapter 109

Stephan was clutching his head, screaming incoherently, while Michael tried to figure out what was going on. He was almost panicking. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. What was even going on? One moment Stephan was fine, and now he looked like someone was scrambling his brain from the inside. The man’s eyes and ears were bleeding, his nose a veritable river of blood.

Fortunately, Michael didn’t need a passive skill to have enhanced reflexes nowadays, and even in his confused state, he was quick enough to realize that Stephan was in great danger. As he activated his [Healing Aura] to heal whatever damage was happening to his sensei, the most curious message appeared in his vision.

Unity level up!

He didn’t have time to dwell on it, though. He had felt something shift when he said the word ‘see,’ like a switch had been flipped, and now the man beside him was convulsing on the ground.

“THE THINGS!” Stephan screamed at the top of his lungs as more and more blood poured out of his orifices. His voice was hoarse, his mind too overwhelmed to even realize he was hurting his own body.

“THEY MOVE!” The blood pooled on the ground, seeping into the dry earth and dyeing it red. Michael flipped him on his side, making sure the blood didn’t make him choke.

“I CAN SEE THEM!”

“What do you see?” Michael asked, yelling himself so that he could be heard through all the noise Stephan was making as he banged his fists on the ground in his convulsions.

He lifted the other man by his shirt as more and more healing energies tried to repair the damage, but it wasn’t enough. Michael could feel that the damage was happening to the man’s brain, as if something was trying to turn it to mush before his very eyes, but he couldn’t figure out what.

“THE CREATURES!” Stephan choked out, lifting a shaking finger as his eyes rolled to the back of his head. The damage was accumulating faster than Michael could heal it.

Following the crooked finger, bent out of shape by involuntary convulsions pulling on the tendons far stronger than a human body could withstand, Michael thought he saw what his sensei was talking about. It was a little thing, almost cute, clinging to the bark of a tree in the distance. To him, it looked like a small distortion in reality itself, a ripple in spacetime. He had been seeing these things for a long time now, all around the dungeon, in the mana cloud itself.

He squinted. They did appear different than they usually did, now that he focused on them.

“HOLES IN REALITY!” Stephan shrieked. “I CAN’T—”

“What are you doing?” Michael interrupted, suddenly having to prevent the other man from clawing his own eyes out. “Stop!”

“NO! THEY SHOULDN’T—”

Michael used his superior strength to restrain him, all the while continuing to heal him. He looked at the critter on the side of the tree again, and now he saw that there wasn’t just one of them, but dozens all around. On the ground, in the air, in the nearby foliage. Hundreds. Thousands. The more he looked, the more he saw. It was as if they were all already there before, but only now was he truly seeing them. So many, he began to feel a slight sense of pressure in his head, a headache forming as if someone was manipulating his grey matter with ethereal fingers, molding it, squeezing.

It clicked. Stephan was convulsing violently now, his own strength tearing his body apart as Michael struggled to keep him still. It all started when Michael told him he should see them for himself. Looking inward as he tried to keep his teacher from killing himself, he saw that the Truth facet of the Unity skill was drawing a minuscule amount of magic to itself.

He willed it to stop.

Suddenly, all the critters were once again just little creatures made of mana. Thousands they were, now he could only see a scant few. Five at most, if he looked around. He could still sort of see that something more lay beneath the surface, beyond mere senses, beneath the first layer of reality, but it didn’t bother him much.

Meanwhile, Stephan slumped in his arms. No longer did he try to claw his eyes out, no longer was he convulsing. The healing energy of Michael’s skill washed over him, repairing all the physical damage in mere seconds, leaving behind a slightly thinner body after having consumed all it could find to keep Stephan alive.

[Healing Aura] was now a rare skill, after Michael had used it to torture the OA general. It now allowed him to sense everything it helped reconstruct through the use of Intent. Michael could clearly sense how much of Stephan’s brain, eyes, and nerves had been replaced by his skill.

If he so wanted, he could snap his fingers and more than two thirds of Stephan’s brain would turn to mush instantly. Yet another tool Michael could use to inflict pain and misery upon others, up to whatever distance he could manage to reach with his Intent.

Carefully, Michael activated the Truth facet of Unity again, but this time without the intention of making anyone else see anything. The little critters became a tiny shade eerier. Five became a dozen. A dozen a hundred. More and more of them appeared, and the headache returned when they reached the thousands. He kept going. Ten thousands. A hundred thousand. Now his own eyes were bleeding, and he felt his stats tick up as he used mana to reinforce his body.

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Then he let the skill go before it became too much.

They returned to normal. But now, looking at them was slightly uncomfortable. When he focused on the sensation, Michael could feel that his Resilience and his other skills were at work here, mitigating what would have been catastrophic damage to little more than a mild annoyance.

The eldritch truth of the world, which could render a person into a vegetable in mere seconds, was nothing more than the annoyance of having sunlight reflected into his eyes from a car window to Michael. At least at the beginning. The more he stared, the stronger this light became, until it was a laser that cut through his consciousness. But a laser was something that was no longer deadly to Michael.

Stephan was unconscious. Without much effort, Michael lifted him up and brought him to the infirmary they had at Site 00. It was a spartan place; beds and basic equipment and not much more. That’s all that was needed when there was a person on site capable of healing anything that modern medicine could and could not. If there was something that was beyond Michael’s ability, then it would certainly be beyond modern medicine as well.

As he set Stephan on the bed, Michael started using [Candle Light] on the unconscious man to heal his mind. Even with that, it took several hours before his sensei woke up.

When he did, he was understandably confused. Michael had considered telling him the truth, but quickly discarded the idea.

‘Hey yo, what’s that over there?’ And then the eldritch truth of the universe made you a vegetable, Michael thought, shaking his head. Yeah, not telling him that.

Instead, he just bullshitted his way out of it.

“It was just an adverse reaction to magic,” he told the man. “I never thought normal people could be affected by it before entering the dungeon.”

Stephan frowned. “Is it the first time it’s happened?”

Michael nodded. He didn’t like lying to his sensei, but it was for the best. He just felt horrible about it. Fortunately, they had been able to clean his clothes with magic before he woke up, erasing all traces of what had happened, and a swig of bourbon was all the social lubricant Michael needed to make lying a bit easier.

“You know,” Stephan commented, “I feel better than fine. Did you use your healing ability on me?”

Michael nodded. “To stabilize you,” he replied. “Nice side effect it has? It also heals all your body’s problems in the meantime.”

As they spoke, Michael couldn’t help but feel like he was a loose cannon. He was already feeling weird about his magic before, like it made him something so far removed from a normal person he shouldn’t even be considered human anymore. Now, he knew that he could basically ruin a person by accident. By just thinking the wrong stray thought.

“Well,” he said, hiding how he was really feeling and finding it easier than he thought it would be, “now that you’re up, how about we grab a bite and then go to the dungeon?”

“Yes, please,” Stephan agreed. “I’m starving.”

In the canteen, they chatted as they ate. Stephan was acting as if nothing had happened to him, but this was an artificial state of mind brought on by prolonged use of [Candle Light]. Michael didn’t know what long-lasting effects this would have on the man, which only fueled his guilt. As a result, Michael was being so careful it bordered on paranoia. Not a speck of magic left his aura, not a shred of emotion was out of place, and he kept a lid on his Truth facet of the Unity skill so tight it almost felt like pulling a muscle.

People were eating and chatting and living their lives all around them. Granted, it wasn’t normal people but Operators a good chuck of which were well into Copper-tier territory, and yet Michael felt like they were all so far beneath him that they barely registered. For the first time in his life, he didn’t feel self conscious in the slightest. It wouldn’t do, after all, to feel self conscious about what you do or how you look before mere ants, would it?

But where did these thoughts come from? Were they his, was he like this, or were they brought by magic?

Shit, I’m turning into an arrogant young master. I don’t want that.

He bottled his thoughts. This state wasn’t sustainable, he knew, but it was the only solution for now. He would have to be hyper-aware of everything his magic did whenever he was with people because if an incident like this happened anywhere else other than Site 00, it would be a problem.

At least, he thought, it will be good training.

Later, they finally took the quad bikes and reached the dungeon. The Space element around it was somewhat diminished, and it was swirling furiously. Checking with Icarus confirmed that both Johanne and Travis Tyrell were inside, the latter challenging the third floor by himself while Johanne was in the Valley working. Michael recorded his findings with the AI for later analysis, and put the phone away.

Stephan looked like he wanted to say something, to which Michael only smirked.

“You’ll get your own AI, if you want it.”

With strings attached, he said. Stephan was smart enough to realize it: “I’ll think about it.”

“This is it, then,” Stephan stated solemnly. “The dungeon.”

Michael hummed. While the cave entrance proper was unchanged compared to how it was the first time he saw it, everything around it was different.

“Why not build the fortifications into the mountain?” Stephan inquired, noticing how they were building a steel door encased in several feet of concrete all around the cave, like an antechamber, rather than changing the stone itself.

“Because the dungeon doesn’t like it when we mess with its entrance. Anything we do just disappears overnight,” Michael explained. “So we are building around it.”

“I see,” Stephan responded. He took a deep breath as his eyes roamed around the deep, dark hole, latching onto the rocks around it lit by the sun. “I think I can feel it from here, you know?”

“It’s just a placebo effect,” Michael said, attempting to joke, but it fell flat to his own ears. He checked and rechecked his aura, but nothing was out of place, and he was sure that the dungeon’s Gaze could not reach outside its space.

“Probably,” Stephan conceded. “I’m just being a pussy. You would think someone like me would show a bit more spine.”

“I’m surrounded by enough crazy people already,” Michael mused. In truth, he never felt fear when approaching the dungeon, and neither did he ever consider it as a possibility until recently. “If you were like Travis or the others, I think I’d get a distorted view of what’s normal, you know?”

Stephan nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted. “I was never a brave one, you know? If there’s one thing martial arts has taught me, it’s that getting into a fight is never a good idea. I love karate because of what it represents, but I’m not one who would use it in the real world.”

“Did Taiko teach that to you?”

Stephan nodded, “these days, I wonder if that old geezer knew more than he let on.”

We are definitely investigating him when he comes to America next month, Michael thought, but did not say out loud.

“It’s different in there,” Michael pointed at the dungeon. “It’s not the real world. To be fair, you will either love it or you will hate it. And even if you love it, there are other factors.”

Like the Gaze. Travis was challenging the third floor alone right now, but he had been preparing for weeks in the valley just to be sure he could withstand the Gaze long enough to beat the floor since there was no leaving once you enter unless you either beat the boss or died.

“I understand,” Stephan acknowledged. “Let’s see what this place is really like, and how it managed to change you so much.”