Luca DR
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Edge of apocalypse 53
🕑 Added 2023-06-01 13:25:41 +0000 UTCDarkness cleared, and vision slowly returned. There was a magical density to the air, on this side of the portal, that was missing in the real world. Its taste was, just like on the other side, similar and yet different from the magic the surrounded Tryte. If Albert had to guess, this was an astral event of some sort, but it was not connected to whatever dimension the Lithoids inhabited.
What this meant in the grand scheme of things remained to be seen.
[You have entered the mini-dungeon: Eiiri’s Warpspace.]
[Due to the high magical density, your mana regeneration is increased by 100%]
[Excessive mana conditions. Any magic above the current cap will be redirected to the System for later upgrades.]
[Reach the core at the center of the maze to seize control of the dungeon.]
Seize control? This was interesting, because it implied that perhaps there was no need to destroy the core when he reached it. What if he could somehow steal the core of this place and use it to increase the power of the yet-to-be-deployed Quadrangle core? Wouldn’t that be awesome?
Also he needed to come up with a better name for the Quadrangle core because there was no universe where he wanted his new base to be shaped like a lopsided square.
In any case. All this required him to reach the core of this dungeon, which meant that the first thing Albert needed to do was to get his bearings. True to its name, the dungeon was utterly confusing. Albert wasn’t sure what a warpspace was supposed to be, but by simply looking around he was kind of getting the idea.
No matter which senses he tried to enhance with the use of his skills, the place refused to give up its secrets when under scrutiny. It was like looking at a kaleidoscope, every time showing a different facet of itself, ever-changing in fractal patterns that pretended to repeat themselves but were never quite the same. There were stairs here and there, but sometimes they led to walls and at other times they hung upside-down from the ceiling.
Like an Escher space, with walls that were not solid but made of translucent crystal. Sometimes reflecting and sometimes refracting the light that hit them, at times see-through and at other times mirrors on which Albert could see a twisted image of himself.
The air was dry, sharp like the small crystalline protrusions that jutted out of the angular surfaces at all places. Every breath was like breathing in small razors, painful and tiring. The high mana density was somewhat soothing, but it also added to the heaviness of the place.
Every little discomfort was amplified tenfold. Albert was at the same time thirsty and jet-lagged, his legs ached and his stomach was upset, and his head swam under the assault of so much light and confusing images. His visual cortex just wasn’t equipped to see what he was seeing, much less to make it make sense.
Nothing moved. Or rather, in a place where everything appeared to be moving with every little movement of the eyes, everything felt as stationary as it could be. When standing perfectly still, Albert was like frozen in a photograph of a corrupted file on a computer, looking at shards of reality and fragments of matter that didn’t belong neither in the real world nor in the oniric dreamscape of a nightmare.
After exhausting the suite of skills he could use to map the place, even if just a little, Albert decided to start exploring. He moved cautiously, careful not to slip on the shiny crystal surfaces and not to stumble upon any hard, yet concealed, edges. As he moved, his mental teleportation map slowly but surely gathered the data from his senses and organized it in a little model of the dungeon.
It showed as a place totally disconnected from the rest of the world. On a whim, Albert decided to try and see if he could teleport out.
[Location unavailable. Leave the dungeon in order to be able to access normal space.]
Leave… and how do I leave?
[By destroying the core.]
Oh, okay. Thank you system.
No response.
“Huh.”
There were times when the stillness of a place made you think about all sorts of thoughts. Unrelated to each other, at a first glance, yet very much connected in ways that were not readily grasped by the conscious mind. Albert’s mind wandered here and there, touching upon many things he experienced in the last few days.
The place around him resonated with his thoughts. And when he eventually found himself thinking about that fateful encounter in the sewers, where he had been forced with his back against a wall, that’s when the peace of the dungeon was shattered.
The crystals felt hostile. Turning red, one after the other, vibrating in a discordant tune that pierced the ears. The air felt sharper than ever, and it was difficult to breathe as the small corridor shifted and moved about, with its walls melting and reforming in ever sharper and longer shards of crystal that encroached and threatened.
Albert found himself gasping for air. He punched the walls with his skill cranked up to max, but all that happened was that his fists hurt, and his knuckles bled. He heaved, struggling to breathe, and kicked and spasmed as the space closed around him.
He was being entombed alive. Struggling. He was not going to be trapped here.
The memory of him gutting PsyOps alive played itself over and over in his mind.
The walls encroached closer. Now his arms were almost trapped, forced in barely a few inches of space around his body, twisted in uncomfortable positions.
His legs too. His toes hurt from a kick to a particularly sharp bit of crystal, and the growths got closer and closer. Already he could feel the cold tips of the crystals poke him.
His limbs ached. All that was in his mind, alongside the sensation of warm blood on his skin, was the aching and struggle of wanting to move but being unable to.
Was the blood his, or was it a memory of when his arm was plunged deep in the warm flesh of the person he killed.
And he got away with it. With killing.
He needed to move.
He couldn’t not move.
He had to.
But the crystals pushed on him with their inevitability.
Breathe. Breathe.
He closed his eyes.
Recognize thought as thought. And let it go.
His mind slowly responded to his will. Even his will being one of the many thoughts arising in his consciousness. He remembered the meditations, he remembered what Other-Albert always liked to ramble about in the skill videos.
And let it all go.
The pressure eased. Replaced by a cold absence.
Albert opened his eyes, and the walls were back where they belonged.
[Mental Fortress skill level up!]
· I-II-III-IV: increased resistance to mind attacks and altered mental states.
· V: You can recognize illusions and attempts of mental manipulation, and dispel them.
Activating his healing skill to mend his bleeding legs, Albert continued on. Now with a much clearer mind, he could somewhat see beyond the illusions that were assaulting his mind. The walls were moving, yes, but not as much as before.
Even his wounds felt wrong. Like he was making them up in his head, like they were not actually there. One second they hurt and bled, the next they were only a faint memory.
Then he got an idea. A genius idea. His phone, which he had enchanted in order to practice his skill in his free time, his phone was an inanimate object and not a person. It didn’t have a mind. It was immune to illusions.
He whipped it out, turned on the camera, and looked at the screen. What he saw there was a mundane – compared to the dizzying space that his eyes were sure they were seeing – and normal crystal cave. Everywhere there were only crystals, but that was it. Sharp, dangerous but otherwise inert crystals.
Which confirms the theory that what I see is mostly an illusion. I wonder if I can use Perception to look past it?
What followed was a short session of tried-and-true scientific trial and error. Albert activated [Perception], tuned to perceive all except for entropy (a facet of the skill he still needed to work on but was procrastinating due to its dangerous nature).
He looked at the world, then at the image in his phone. And he didn’t stop until what he saw with his eyes, and what the camera of his phone saw were one and the same thing. Every time tweaking the flow of mana, committing every little detail to memory.
He was a bit angry at himself for having wasted his daily use of analysis mode on Singaporean Chinese but there was no way he could have known.
Then, after longer than Albert was willing to admit, everything clicked.
[Perception skill level up!]
· I: Your perception of the world is heightened.
· II: You can see magic.
· III: Your ability to hear sounds is increased by 3 times.
· IV: You can perceive nearby objects.
· V: You can perceive Entropy. Currently UNUSABLE.
· VI: (Prior conditions met) You can see past illusions passively.
Clearing a whole dungeon while only being able to see through the small screen of a phone was not a smart idea, after all. Which proved to be a good intuition, because a mere hundred meters away from where Albert was, lied in wait the first real enemy of this dungeon.
