Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 55
🕑 Added 2023-06-03 12:22:08 +0000 UTCSometimes there are habits, customs that people follow, thinking them as absolute rules that cannot be broken, bent or negotiated. Ignoring that, in most cases, what are thought to be ironclad rules are simply assumptions one makes about their situation. It’s a bad habit, so to speak, of the brain trying to save on computational power, unable to understand the difference between correlation, causation and imposition.
Usually a person goes on with their life unaware of the problem. There are, however, certain specific times when the situation becomes unbearable, when following traditions under the disguise of rules becomes unacceptable, or even just inconvenient enough that another method of going about things is sought.
Sometimes such a method exists and is found.
Albert stared at the dungeon core. If he wanted, he felt that he could easily destroy it with a single swing of his new sword. It did look fragile and defenseless on its icy pedestal, trying with all its meager might to summon more defenses against the interloper.
“There has to be another way.” Albert muttered to himself, pacing around the pedestal. It was a free core, after all. Who knew what he could do with it!
He could just pluck it, his mind thought. He tried to do just that, but very predictably as soon as he plucked it from its pedestal… nothing happened. He was still inside the dungeon, and all seemed to be exactly the same as before, with the only evident difference being that the core was no longer stationary but was being moved around by him. Even going back to the first chamber did nothing, and no hint of an exit portal appeared where Albert first was transported to the dungeon.
But then he remembered something. The quest that asked him to destroy the core promised something very interesting as a reward. He pulled it up, inspecting the text in search of a loophole he could exploit.
Quest: Seal the Eastern Crack.
· Eliminate the source of astral destabilization by destroying the core of the dungeon before it triggers an Event.
· Reward: System upgrade: Inventory module.
He felt almost dirty, trying to exploit the very same system that was giving him power. He had grown almost attached to it, and it felt like a betrayal.
Which, in the end, didn’t matter much because the wording of the quest left no room for negotiation.
Damn, why does it give me an inventory only after the deed? It’s so silly… Unless.
“Hey System.” Albert said to the air.
As predicted, there was no response to a random summon. The system only answered when it had a reason to do so.
“Could you unlock the Inventory now, and change the quest so I don’t have to destroy the core? I really want to take it home with me, feed it to the Quadrangle and all that.”
Still no answer.
“What if we made a deal? Maybe you need the energy to create the skill, and normally you would go and take it from the destruction of the core. Right? What if you took it from my Healing ability instead? How about that?”
OVERRIDE. Skill: Healing III Removed.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Quest: Seal the Eastern Crack Removed.
New Quest: Seal the Eastern Crack abridged.
· Eliminate the source of astral destabilization by stealing the core of the dungeon before it triggers an Event.
· Reward: System upgrade: Inventory module.
Inventory module Unlocked.
In all fairness, had there not been a system message telling Albert that he now had an inventory, he would have not noticed any difference. It was only when he went prodding at his status by thinking hard about it that he noticed a new section had appeared – splitting the old section into two.
He immediately decided to try it, freeing himself of the hefty weight of the sword. Without even having to do something, except mentally authorize the expense of a modest amount of mana, his sword disappeared from the material world and appeared in a small list in his status.
Inventory: 2/26
· 2 minor mana potions
· Blade of the Late Eiiri
Equipment
· Minor ring of Protection
“Nice. Thank you, system.”
Setting his eyes on the core, Albert noticed that it was now much whiter and cloudier than it was before and the material inside its glassy surface seemed to be spinning in a violent motion, ever faster.
Without wasting any more time, he put the core in his inventory.
Oh. He thought, surprised. The action had cost him almost half his total mana this time, despite the orb being barely a few kilograms in weight. Must be due to the magical nature of the item?
Quest: Seal the Eastern Crack abridged Complete.
There was not much time to think, because as soon as the source of magic was removed, all of the dungeon around Albert began to collapse. Cracks begun to spread across every surface, covering everything in the fractal shape of glass cracking, until space itself began to warp.
Then Albert was back in the real world. Surrounded by forest, heat, humidity, animals, and—
People? Guns? Guns!
Fortunately for him, Albert had the habit of overfixating on things. This much should be clear by now. And one of the objects of his ever-changing fixation had been optimizing the execution time of a teleportation skill use. It had not been enough to trigger a skill level up, but it allowed him to use the first level of the skill (which stated that in order to teleport, he needed to achieve full concentration) almost instantly.
This meant that, when he saw that the area he spawned in was surrounded by armed military men, with weapons trained on him and speaking a language he could not understand at all, all it took for him to teleport away to safety was the time necessary for his conscious mind to realize that leaving was the only correct course of action.
***
There are places, called liminal spaces or non-loci, of passage. These are called non-places for a specific reason, for they serve a purpose and are filled with people but never any of these people stop to observe them. They are, simply for the sake of fulfilling their purpose, and not to be gazed upon.
This is why, when Albert suddenly came to be in the middle of the Singapore airport, nobody seemed to notice. It wasn’t that they were not paying attention. Most of them surely weren’t, but some were bound to have been looking in his direction. It was more to do with the nature of an airport, so full of people with forgettable faces and clothes, its architecture completely mundane to the eye despite the best efforts of the designers and architects.
Albert slumped on a metal chair below the leaves of a fake plant. His phone, now picking up a signal after a long time in the dungeon, vibrated with messages arriving one after the other, suffocatingly quick.
Having an enchanted phone meant two things: one was that Albert never needed to charge it. As long as it was on his person the phone simply took a tiny amount of mana from Albert’s mana pool to keep itself fully charged. It also meant that he could receive a signal even on an alien planet, like what happened on Erebus.
He wrongfully thought that this meant he could use his phone from anywhere in the galaxy, even outside of it. Even in a dungeon. Not thinking that, instead, his phone simply gained the ability to use any network and attach to any carrier without care for roaming restrictions or encryption or costs or whatnot.
An understandable blunder, considering that at the time he first noticed that on Erebus he was receiving HDF signal, he had no idea what the letters even meant. By the time he knew their meaning, the event had been lost to memory, buried under much more meaningful other events.
The main problem was that there had been no signal in the dungeon, and the lack of notifications paired with all the incessant action-hyperfixation-action loops that happened meant that Albert had completely lost any track of time while he was in there.
Only now did he notice how much time really passed.
But first, since he knew that reading the phone would mean psychological suffering, he decided to read a system notification that had gone ignored as he tried to escape the Singaporean equivalent of the BSA.
Congratulations on the creative approach to solve the problem. You now know that magic is more flexible than most other fundamental forces. A new skill has been added as a reward.
New Skill: Healing Touch I
· I: You can perform a quick healing incantation on yourself or on others. The skill will attempt to restore the body to its peak possible condition. Cost will adjust to the injury being healed.
Well. This was good. What was not going to be good was his return home. He kind of wanted to stay in the airport a bit longer, but he knew that would only delay the inevitable.
He sighed.
It was time to go back home, where an enraged Samantha Cromwell was waiting for his arrival to finally show Transit Global what she could offer in exchange for their collaboration.
