Chapter 89
“The Elements?” asked Michael. “What do you mean?”
“Unlike higher forms of energy, the Elements appear to need less structure to convey meaning. My preliminary tests with Elemental stones seem to confirm this.”
“Really?”
Johanne nodded, “Indeed. There was a whole team of programmers trying to figure out a language to make the stones do our bidding, making inscriptions with crushed mana crystals or using electrodes to stimulate the stones, but they kept failing. The stones just seemed to do whatever they wanted. It wasn’t that they had a will of their own, of course.” She took a breath, as if she was about to force out words she didn’t like. “It turns out, as much as it pains me to say, that the Elements are holistic in nature. It works in our favor, despite the lack of scientific rigor. Anyone with a manipulation ability can simply… tell them what to do, and they will do it, albeit reluctantly. It takes a while, but it works. Higher magic does not work like this, as you saw with mana.”
Michael was intrigued. Thinking back to how he used the Ice and Fire at his command to coat the bullet he used to kill Carmela—the idea of having taken a life still pained him as a human being—he realized that she was right. “I see. I can control them without fractals or complex structures. Just with thought.”
“How long did it take you to figure it out?” the woman asked. It occurred to him that the programmers and researcher couldn’t have been here for longer than a day or two, which meant that they actually proposed the experiments and she carried them out in the dungeon, taking days or perhaps even weeks to carry them out and then coming back to the real world with the results.
“No time at all. In fact, I was doing it without even realizing it, at first.”
Johanne smiled, “as I thought, my lord, you have more talent than most people. We must put it to good use and gather more elements.”
“Not so fast,” Michael said, shaking his head. “I still have a limited capacity. It’s shy of 200 units, right now. Not really enough to do much even when it’s all just one element. I think I’ll stick with Ice until the pool either gets bigger, or I find a way to integrate Ice within my aura.”
“As you wish. The idea is sound, though,” she said, and Michael wondered whether she was being a yes-woman or if she really agreed with him. The idea that she wasn’t simply fawning over him felt much more realistic now that he considered that she must have spent weeks of personal time trying to make the elements obey her. “If you keep using Ice,” she continued, “you might get familiar enough with it that integrating it with your aura will come easier.”
Michael did not mention that he needed Qi to do it, at least according to what Theobond had told him. So far, he had been doing just fine with using his Qi even though he had no idea where his Dantian was, but things were changing. For instance, no matter how hard he tried, integrating Ice into his aura was proving beyond him, and he doubted it was just a matter of familiarity or he wouldn’t be able to manipulate and absorb the Element in the first place.
“Well, this has been a productive few days,” Michael said, stretching, “but it’s time for me to reemerge. I’m going to top-up on the Ice element and get out.”
“Of course, my lord. See you outside.”
***
Michael was the first to leave, leaving Johanne to run some experiments in the Valley alone. They would—after all—reemerge at the same time thanks to the dungeon’s time shenanigans. That was why, when she left the place several weeks of personal time later, she was surprised to see that Michael was nowhere to be seen. Halfway through her contingency actions, he appeared with a swirl of magic.
One minute after her, minus or plus some seconds. She quickly checked how many.
“We might have a problem, my lo—Michael,” she said, still not used to calling him by name when they were in public.
“What’s that?” he asked nonchalantly. Sometimes she wished she could be like him, carefree, but then she remembered how high his Resilience stat was and just what he must have lived through to get it. She too was plenty strong, mentally, but her experience in the amber had not translated well to Michael’s modern world.
She took a deep breath, her voice defaulting to monotone. “You have emerged exactly 62 seconds after I did,” she said clinically. They had devices recording every access to the dungeon, linking every machine-recognized face with precise timestamps provided by an atomic clock buried underground.
Michael hummed.
“It could be a big deal, sir,” she said.
“I know,” Michael said, much to her relief. At least he wasn’t ignoring the issue, not that he ever did. “We need to investigate.”
“I shall be on it as soon as time permits, perhaps even sooner.”
“Do not postpone the expeditions for this.”
“Understood. I will make do in the interim, then. However, this could be a grave matter.”
“You said that already. Not that I don’t see it. We need to know if it’s just me or others as well. If it’s just me, we need to figure out what’s changed. Is it my growing power, that the dungeon can’t keep up with? If it’s others as well, is it an issue with the dungeon itself?”
He and Johanne bounced some ideas back and forth on the way back to Site 00, after which she quickly excused herself so that she could bunker down in her temporary container-lab. Her assistant was there, coordinating a team of particle physicists who were gushing over a single mana crystal.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
“We can’t really know what the hell this material even is, without proper instruments,” she heard them mutter, “how can we know what this is if we can’t blast it with high energy particles?”
“In due time,” she said imperiously, and suddenly the room grew quiet. “Our toys will arrive soon, but not before the actual lab is built. They are fragile, as you know. Now, to get your mind off of such tragedies like delays and being forced to wait, here is a conundrum. Michael has just left the dungeon 62 seconds late based on the ten-minute window everybody else experiences. It’s the first time it has happened, and as far as we know it has only affected him. While we wait for more data, I want you to formulate hypotheses and plans. It is imperative we figure out what is going on, and fast.”
***
Michael sat in the shade of a temperature-controlled gazebo together with Old Dave, Travis, and Johanne. They were in the deep forest close to the dungeon, in the middle of summer, and it should have been humid, hot, and stifling. Instead, thanks to some cleverly constructed Elemental stone arrays, the space within the boundaries of the open-air gazebo was kept at a pleasant 75F. Crossing the invisible threshold into the forest proper was enough to start sweating again, but the place was spacious enough for all four of them. It helped that only Michael and Old Dave were sitting, while the others stood nervously watching Jennifer and Trevor shout orders to the Operators assembling near the entrance to the dungeon.
“Listen up, troops! This is no stroll through the woods. I expect focus and precision. First team, you’re up. Lone delvers, you go in after the teams. Iron-ranks with no skills, you are to go between teams.”
“Man,” Michael commented, “she sure looks like a whole other person when issuing orders to her underlings.”
“You should see Mr. CEO when he gets all fired up,” Johanne said, talking about Travis. “Some people say he’s outright scary.”
The man in question did not take the bait.
To the side, Old Dave snorted. “I think everyone in the chain of command is rather different with their men than they are with Michael. For good reason.”
“…and, that’s my cue,” said Travis as Johanne was about to finish her drill sergeant-style speech.
The man squared up, the very air around him crackling with power and authority. A side effect of an aura, Michael knew now thanks to his training, and something he could replicate but bigger and meaner since he also had a skill to enhance his presence.
Travis’ aura had the desired effect, and immediately all Operators went stiff and focused their attention on the head of Candle Light. Travis’ fame also helped, having by now reached outright fantastical and scary levels. He was, according to the rumors, the figure nobody would want to make an enemy of, the scary man at the top, the one who kept the whole thing standing by sheer power and force of will. The scary boogeyman.
They were definitely right, but Michael knew the limits of Travis’ power. He would have to talk to him because, while powerful, Travis definitely needed to be carried up to Silver rank before they met with the OA.
The man addressed the Operators, assembled by teams on one side and lone Operators on the other, all in orderly lines. He instructed them on what to do in the dungeon, how to engage the monsters—a thing they had already been drilled about for days—and what to do once they cleared the dungeon. He set clear limits and reminded them of the control protocols.
After that, the first team went in. Travis moved on to address the other teams, waiting as if in line for the first team to emerge ten minutes later.
“They could go in right now,” Old Dave observed.
Johanne nodded. “We have decided not to. It’s much easier to control the output this way.”
Indeed, ten minutes later, right before the team appeared, Johanne got up and took position. Michael, too, approached the dungeon, leaving the temperature-controlled gazebo with a grimace. Fortunately, the Ice in his aura could be used to mitigate the hellish summer temperatures, although not without sacrificing a lot of his stored Elemental Ice in the process.
The team appeared, and Michael’s eyes blazed with magic as his [Magic Sense] flared up. For good measure, he swept the men with his aura as well, getting faint echoes of something. They were too garbled and weak to recognize, but already, he was seeing yet another use of his aura abilities.
Skill Level up!
[Magic Sense] reaches level 8. When scanning people weaker than you with your aura, you get faint glimpses of their abilities.
“All low copper and one mid-copper,” he said, the surprise of the level-up not showing on his face. The four men stood at attention, but they were battered and bruised. Their equipment was clean, thanks to the dungeon, but it was in bad shape.
However, it was nothing compared to their faces. They were haunted, hollow, outright terrified. Up until ten minutes ago, they regarded Michael as if he was just another person, but now they seemed to instinctively understand the vast gulf between them and him, despite Michael having never shown them his magic. He reigned in his aura, and they relaxed a little bit.
“You three,” Michael continued, hiding his inner feelings as more and more things about his aura were made evident now that he was interacting with normal people. “You are cleared to go to Jennifer for debriefing. Remember to write down a detailed report of all your abilities.”
The last man gulped. “You,” Michael said, smiling. It didn’t have the effect he hoped it would have, instead making the trained soldier who must have seen hell on earth shiver when looking at Michael. “Higher auras go to Travis; you know that, right?”
The man nodded. He glanced in Travis’ direction for a fleeting moment. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I-I shall go to Chief Tyrell immediately.”
“Good. Before that, how did you end up at a higher level than even your squad leader?”
“Squad leader Tormundine said I was more talented than the others, sir. He said he had orders to let me take the lead in combat, sir.”
Michael nodded. “Go on.”
The man was stiff. “We hit a bit of a snag when a few of the guns were damaged, sir. I took the lead with my skill from that point onwards, sir.”
Michael squinted, focusing his aura. The man recoiled but then stood his ground, a testament to his training. “It’s a good melee skill. Tell Travis I’d like to have you promoted to squad leader. You can go.”
“Thank you, sir.” The man said, saluted, and bolted.
“You’re scaring the grown men, Michael,” Old Dave joked.
Michael shrugged. “They have opened their eyes to the gulf between us.”
Old Dave shook his head. “I too have, you know? I know what they see, yet I do not react like they do, do I?”
“Well, that’s because we are friends.”
“There’s another difference between Travis and me and them,” the man said pensively. “We never did go in the dungeon alone, did we?”
“Travis did,” Michael said.
“He’s not representative of the whole wider population now, is he? He likes to call himself crazy, did you know that? Besides, he barely even goes to the Valley to work. He only fights through the first floor because he has to. Myself? Twice I tried to go in alone, and let me tell you… I am never doing it again if I can help it. I know I can’t avoid going at all because I need to get stronger. But alone? Nah. That place, it does something to you. When the next batch of Operators comes out, look at their faces. Really look at them. You’ll understand. And if not, just talk to them once they calm down, if they ever do. At least, the silver lining is that with such a fear of powerful magic, our Operators will never underestimate an Anomaly when they get sent to deal with it. God knows we will need them.”