11 – Shattered Fractal

Cal’Eer studied the diagram, occasionally turning it around and upside down to get a better feel of what he was looking at. After a while he carefully set aside the paper with the design of the three switches in a box, and pulled himself towards another page he had previously prepared, his wheeled chair sliding on the smooth floor with no sound. He compared the numbers in the diagram to their explanation on the second page.

After he mentioned the M-field, Julian had snatched away the paper from his hands and fell into a silent and meticulous reading of the whole stack. Cal had tried to ask him what he was reading about, or why he had reacted like this, but had gotten no answers to his questions. After a while he got bored enough that he thought he might as well attempt to figure out what was going on with the switches, seeing how much they bugged Julian on the way here. They seemed to be connected to some sort of holding cells, and a series of experiments were mentioned but never explained in the diagrams, pointing at other documents Cal didn’t have here. There was one special cell, it appeared, being tested to hold something dubbed Renegade.

“This makes no sense, this work shouldn’t be here.” Julian’s voice was shaking.

“What do you mean?” Cal looked up from the diagram in concern.

“This stuff here, the M-field? This was one of my early research attempts in figuring out the Fifth force. The force that eventually led me to the discovery of the System.”

“Are you saying they were researching the same stuff here?” Cal asked.

“No.” He said, pausing for a moment to massage his eyes. “I am saying that this is my research. My notes, reformatted and expanded by… someone. They didn’t stop where I stopped though. I discarded the M-field theory because it violated the Causality Constraint, but whoever wrote this stuff either didn’t care, or found a way around that problem… it doesn’t say. They were preparing something big here, a sort of experiment or something.”

“Oh, then I think I know what the other switches were for.” Cal said.

Julian kept going. “It doesn’t make sense. I thought that the system only put procedurally generated stuff in the various floors. This doesn’t feel procedural.”

Cal looked at his diagrams, eyes resting on the holding cells and the switches. The switches, it appeared, were for the holding cells, which meant that they were now all open. That would explain the monster they encountered, but also…

“Uh, Julian?”

“Wait. I’m thinking. If this isn’t procedural, then the system lifted it from somewhere. But I destroyed the notes. Unless…”

A small tremor shook the table. “Julian?”

“Shit. The system was already present before the apocalypse, wasn’t it? It knew of my research. Did it hand it over to someone, or did it actually AI expand upon it? I can’t say at a glance if the math is consistent or if it’s AI shit.” His eyes glazed over as he went over the math in his mind.

Cal basically threw the designs for the holding cells in his friend’s face. “Julian!”

“What?”

“The switches!” Cal said hurriedly. “We need to get the hell out of here!”

Julian stared at the sheets for a long moment. “Oh no. Oh, we totally fucked up.” He said.

“We need to leave.” Cal said.

“But… but… we can’t. I need to access those computers, I need to know!”

“No,” Cal dragged Julian out of the room. Despite being a mage, the huge alien had no problems carrying the squirming human with one hand. “We are not staying here one second more.”

They evacuated the room and ran towards the exit, hurrying down the long tunnel. The vibrations were suddenly much more pronounced and the flickering lights plunged the whole tunnel into an eerie atmosphere. The ground shook. The lights died one after the other, beginning at a distance and encroaching ever faster. The sound of broken glass and shattering enveloped the cramped space. Cal and Julian stopped and looked at each other, each falling into their own battle stance, and waited.

It wasn't long before they saw it. The monster was a formless mass of mirror surfaces, rotating in the air and scattering what little was left of the light of the tunnel into a myriad of rainbows and light shafts, traced in the suspended dust. This was the keeper of this dungeon, its shackles simple switches places beside the light switches by an evil intelligence. The System had played him well, Julian thought, knowing full well he would flip all the switches out of curiosity.

There was not much time to think, Julian knew, but he couldn’t help but wonder why the system was doing this. And also who was the unknown scientist who was studying the M-field, why did he get Julian’s notes, where did he end up in the end, and why did the system lift his bunker and place it here like a dungeon on Julian’s path? It was clear the placement of this structure was not random, as were the switches, obvious bait. So the system knew. It knew Julian was going to do something with it, and had a plan to deal with him.

A screech made his thoughts collapse.

At the center of the mass of swirling glass and entropy was a dark shadow, and looking at it they couldn't make out what shape it was, or what lied at the center of the darkness. But they knew it was dangerous.

Julian lunged at it, hoping to have the first move. He moved in a zigzag pattern, dodging the sharp surfaces as they came at him. Looking at them at the corner of his vision he could see something beyond their horizon, but he forced his eyes away from the luring sight. He jumped and tried to land a solid hit on the central mass with his sword, and the mass suddenly shifted and reacted almost as if predicting the incoming hit. Julian immediately corrected his trajectory and tried to abort, rolling on the ground and barely avoiding a stab from one of the shattered mirror edges that floated around the mass. It exploded on the ground in a shower of broken glass that embedded itself in the concrete walls.

Julian recoiled and repositioned at a distance from the monster. That was luck, straight up luck, he thought. His mind went to his Arcane stat and he wondered if that was what saved him.

Behind him Cal was pelting the monster with blades made of wind, and deflecting the ever faster reflective solid surfaces that orbited around the central mass with Air Shields. However the more he fought the harder the fight seemed to become.

Julian’s sword, even though he stopped even trying to hit the central mass but just tried to destroy the orbiting mirrored glass surfaces, only seemed to hit the air. His targets jerked and moved out of the way at the last second, and the same could be said about Cal's wind blades. It was as if the monster knew what was going to hit it, and dodged at the last second.

“It’s predicting our moves!” Cal yelled from behind.

“Yeah,” Julian said. “It must be using the M-field.” He grunted.

“What do you mean?” Cal’s voice echoed.

“It knows what we’re going to do before we do it. There are ways to do that, one of them is M-field reversal.”

An explosion rocked the air. A neon tube flickered and died in a spray of shattered glass, sparks and luminescent gas. The floating shards around the monster scraped the walls, screeching and tearing chunks of concrete that fell on the floor.

“So it knows the outcome of the fight and still chose to fight us?” Cal asked.

Julian hummed pensively, but it came out as a groan as he struggled to fend off the monster’s attacks with his shield.

“I don’t know if it can see that far into the future.” He yelled back.

“But it knows enough to fight us.”

“Huh. I think so?”

There was a moment of silence between the two. “I say we run.” Cal said.

“We're going to need a diversion. I'll do it you start running.”

Cal nodded and immediately dashed towards the monster. Julian took initiative and began to attack the central shadow with a barrage of nonstop attacks. It didn't matter that none of the his attacks connected, he only needed to distract the monster long enough for his friend to escape. He didn’t try to parry the incoming attacks, choosing to deflect them with his shield instead. It consumed more stamina, and the continuous blows threatened to break his stance, but trying to parry would be too risky.

He had no idea how the monster managed to manipulate the M-field, but there had to be limits to his power.

He was right. The monster only focused on him and on dodging his attacks. His a stamina depleted quickly, the green bar going down at an alarming rate. He looked away from the monster, distracting himself for just one second, to check if Cal was far enough away to disengage. It was a mistake, he realized too late. A huge shard of translucent glass hurled towards him. He had no time to dodge. Time dilated, adrenaline kicking his brain into overdrive. His mind frantically went over all the possible skills and moves he could use to save himself from a certain hit, but came up empty. He couldn't perform the movement required to Parry, stuck as he was in the middle of an attack, nor could he roll. He didn't have the stamina for it.

He inhaled. His only hope was tanking the hit, praying the points he had put into Vigor were enough. The sharp end of the shard hit him square in the chest, shredding his armor like it was paper and piercing him. He screamed in agony, staring down the reflective surface of the shard that impaled him. Once again he saw something beyond the reflection, like a vision of a universe for the briefest of moments. Then he was lucid once again. He knew that he had to get away soon, before the other shards converged on him and tore him to pieces.

He struggled, forcing his body to move despite his mind screaming him not to. He placed his hands on the shard, its sharp edge digging into his bare skin scraping his bones, and pulled. His hand slipped, the blood from the cut making the shard difficult to grip onto. He squeezed harder, tightening the hold on the shard as much as he could while screaming in pain. The world collapsed into a single moment in his mind. It was either this or death, and despite knowing that he would respawn his mind rejected death.

The shard came out. He collapsed to the ground panting but did not wait a single moment before getting up. His stamina had regenerated enough for him to run away, rolling on the ground to avoid the incoming projectiles. He did not look back even once as he reached the large steel door that separated the dark tunnel from the outside. He jumped out of the tunnel, erupting as if propelled by an explosion, and Cal immediately sealed the door shut behind him.

Julian sat down on the hot sand, panting and shivering with pain. His HP bar was dangerously empty. After a while he looked at Cal, who was also sprawled on the ground with his back propped against a rock, and cursed.

“Fuck! This was the system messing with me. I thought we were going to find scrolls, spells and nice items… not mindfucks! What the hell was that?”

He screamed more curses, slowly getting up and looking at the gaping hole in his chest. There was a Bleed buildup meter in his HUD, thankfully only half full, and emptying rapidly.

“I need a vacation.” He said while gathering wood for a fire to heal. “I need a classic, easy and fun adventure where I find nice items and level up a lot. We fight monsters and solve puzzles and win with the power of friendship. That’s what I need.”

“Well…” Cal began.

“No!” Julian threw a stick on the ground. “I’m kidding! That adventure would suck ass. I live for this shit, for the mystery and the fucked up stuff. It’s just… I need to vent. Let’s go hunt desert monsters.”

Cal nodded. “I can do that. I can totally do that.”