A Jaded Life

Looking around the tunnel leading deeper into the mountain, I needed a moment to figure out why our surroundings looked so strange to me. It should have occurred to me that it wasn’t so much a strange appearance but rather the lack of one that was throwing me off. The tunnel looked plain, with solid concrete walls, coloured lines on the ground to give directions to those knowing how to read them and an endless row of yellow lightbulbs set in steel cages to illuminate this example of utility to the world. Nothing to write home about, absolutely nothing I should be interested in, at least until that moment of confusion passed and I was reminded that the Change had happened and this area shouldn’t look like this.

Sure, it was a dungeon and different rules applied but should a dungeon look this, well, ordinary? Would the airmen usually working here come through the next moment for one reason or another? Maybe because the coffee was gone or something like that, some sort of major tragedy.

My confusion was further reinforced when I heard the movement of hard-soled feet further ahead and we all readied ourselves for combat. This was a dungeon after all, even if it looked like the Change had bypassed the mountain for some reason. The expectation was that we would have to fight something, or that there was some challenge involved, though that challenge could change in form and appearance greatly, depending on the circumstances. But, in every case, the challenge would be dangerous.

In this case, we were met with something somewhat unexpected. A group of four guys clad in green-grey uniforms came jogging around the next corner, all four of them carrying some form of firearm. Two had long rifles, the other two were carrying pistols and all four were shouting their challenges at us. How we were supposed to freeze and get on the ground at the same time, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I wasn’t about to listen to their demands, especially when one of them looked at Lia and let out something about her eyes while starting to raise his gun. Given the short distance, their obvious firearms and the danger involved, I decided it would be prudent to strike first and ask questions later, so I activated overflow, giving me a massive boost to the power I could channel at once, and struck with my Mind Magic.

As I did, another shout about eyes was raised and aborted when my magic blasted them, sending their minds into the sweet oblivion of unconsciousness. Doing so took a lot more out of me than I had expected, to the point that one of the two in the back was only knocked down, not knocked out and was already raising his gun again when my mind recovered from the moment I needed to channel such absurd amount of power. Whatever the case here may be, these four guys were a lot stronger than expected, though the exact level of the guy didn’t matter so much when Lia leapt forward and made sure that none of us would be shot by tearing the gun from the guys hand with a swift jerk, breaking the hand in the process.

Sadly, even that wasn’t enough to keep the guy down. Instead, he forced himself back on his feet with a surprisingly smooth move and tried to pull a knife with his off-hand, only for Lia to knock him down again with a vicious punch. When he still wasn’t done, I struck again with my Mind Magic, finally sending him into unconsciousness.

“Fascinating,” I muttered, as I was using Observe to get an idea of what we were facing. My eyes went wide when I realised that the four guys were in the early nineties, just as my own party was. This, undoubtedly, was the highest-level dungeon we had come across just yet, high level enough to challenge us seriously. “Let’s try finding out what they know,” I decided and helped Lia and Luna to bind them, making sure that they couldn’t try to harm us or themself.

Once the four were bound, I decided to wake one of them up, curious about their reaction. This might be a case similar to the one of the Winter Wolves, where the people in this base had somehow managed to turn their base into a dungeon and bound themself to it, evading the change that way, though I was doubting the possibility of that. The only way I could imagine it happening was that a high-ranking officer, somebody with authority over the people here, had been playing Road to Purgatory and when the change hit, they had somehow managed to dungeonify the base and their authority over the personnel in their care somehow transferred the people over, too. It was an incredible stretch but it at least sounded somewhat plausible, though with far too many ‘somehow’ thrown in.

Upon waking, the guy was briefly confused, muttering under his breath, before his eyes focused on me and I could almost feel the distrust and hate radiate from his entire being. Still somewhat slurred from the forced nap, he spat at me that he would not serve us monsters and, no matter which of us tried to talk to him, that was the only thing he told us. That he would not serve us.

In an attempt to learn more, I tried to use my Mind Magic to compel him to speak truthfully and answer our questions but the only result of that attempt was to have him scream in agony as he tried to break the shackles holding him. He failed, but it looked like the guy had some training in resisting mental control or something like that and was completely focused on evading it. I might have been able to overwhelm his mind but the result wouldn’t have been pretty. The mind was a delicate construct and using overwhelming force had a good chance of ending up with a vegetable, unable to give us more information.

So, I went even subtler, using techniques similar to those I employed when helping somebody learn magic by pulling them into the Astral River. If I could separate his mind from his body, I had a chance to get the information in a setting he was comfortable with, if the guy was a person at all. By now, and due to his extreme focus and mental resistance, I began to wonder if the guy was simply a construct of a dungeon, without any personality or ego at all. In that case, I doubted he would have useful information, though given that Dungeons were generally all about the challenge, he might have but they would be buried deep within his mind, making it ‘challenging’ to dig them out.

Given that dropping the guy into the Astral River wouldn’t help, I decided to take a different approach. We were within a mind after all, so it should be possible to create any environment I wanted, even without the use of Astral Power. In the Astral River, I had mainly created platforms and similar constructs to act as a reference frame for the one dragged in but now, I had to go a lot further. Luckily, my mind was a lot stronger than it had been when I first used the original technique and I managed to prod the guy’s mind into providing the environment, allowing me to insert something of myself to glean information.

Looking at the environment I was in from the outside, as I was both providing the framing for the environment and interacting with it, was utterly bizarre as if I was looking into a dollhouse while also acting as a doll within that house. In this case, the dollhouse was shaped like a briefing or interrogation-, room here in the base, the image provided by the guy when I used a mental prompt of ‘debriefing’. However, while that first step worked out quite well, the next didn’t work, despite my success in inserting a copy of myself into the environment, dressed in appropriate apparel to interrogate the guy.

The moment my copy began talking, the guy noticed that something was up and returned to his chant of ‘you monsters will not take me’, his conviction strong enough to distort the environment and ultimately overcome my magic, leaving me with a blinding headache. Getting kicked out of another’s mind was never a pleasant experience and having it happen forcefully only made things worse.

Sitting back, I looked at the pair of bloodshot eyes glaring at me, trying to burn a hole through my skull with pure loathing and hatred.

“Incoming,” Lia’s warning pulled my attention away from our prisoners and towards the corridor, from where I could hear more footsteps now that I was paying attention. Knowing that we’d likely be attacked the moment we were spotted, I readied myself to fight once again.

Only for my mind to stumble for a second when it wasn’t guys in camouflage uniforms running around the corner to save their fellow airmen but a pair of metal-clad figures, their heads concealed by massive bronze snake-heads.