Chapter 49

“Halt!” one of the bannermen said, but Michael shot forward in a burst of speed, scooping the loot he had gained up with one hand and touching the floating glyph with the other. Then he was gone, leaving behind a ring of blue-skinned soldiers clad in armor all staring at the same empty spot in space.

It wasn’t completely empty: most of the loot had fallen to the ground, coins and skill stones and the like, but Michael had managed to snatch a single orange stone before he disappeared, a stone that was now tightly clutched in his hand. The glyph, its power spent to send Michael back to the surface, was dormant in his soul along with the others, waiting to be remade into the Unity.

The task felt impossible now that the other pieces were in the hands of the castle people, the very same people who had surrounded Michael and had almost killed him to take his glyphs, but it was a problem for another day.

Travis was there when Michael reappeared from the dungeon with a scowl on his face. It could very well have been the first time Travis had seen him with such an expression on his face, but Michael did not care one bit. His mind was swirling with thoughts, emotions and curse words. Many curse words.

I don’t want to think about what I will find next time I go to the second floor…

The situation was a mess. He had lost his general, Drullkrin, and that already stung more than he had thought it would. Then he had almost been skewered by the castle’s soldiers ambushing him right after he defeated the king, and had only been able to escape thanks to the glyph’s return feature. Now, now he was left to figure out what the hell he was going to do about it, and meanwhile the situation in the real world wasn’t much better.

“I kinda wish I got more loot,” Travis said, trying to make small talk after having sensed Michael’s foul mood, but not its source.

“You know what you have to do to get it,” Michael replied, his tone of voice a bit sharper than he intended.

“Yeah. Put myself in greater danger, basically. I think that now’s not the time to risk my life, though, wouldn’t you agree?”

Michael simply hummed, lost in thought. Travis, sensing that his attempt at conversation had not eased Michael’s distress, tried to ask him about it in roundabout and less roundabout ways, but never got an answer. The issues plaguing Michael’s mind were about the second floor, and he wasn’t going to talk about it to Travis just yet.

“Well, anyway,” Travis said, waving his hand in the air as if to dispel the foul mood. “I have some people who might be able to extract some information out of the trail cams. The memory cards are cooked, but you know how it is with digital information.”

“Do you think you can get something out of them?”

Travis shrugged. “Hard to say. One time I had to spend a hundred thousand dollars to try and recover data from a hard drive that got corrupted because a metal pin fell out of alignment. They got nothing. But then you hear about a kid who put back together a drive that was smashed with a sledgehammer, one piece at a time, and recovered enough data from it to even blackmail a CEO.” He said. “Didn’t go very well for the kid afterwards, though.”

“Speaking of kids,” Michael said suddenly, tapping on his phone, “you should have someone check the links I’m sending you. See if they can figure out who wrote those posts.”

Travis took out his phone and clicked the links, taking a few moments to scan the contents, a frown matching Michael’s own appearing on his face. “Is this what I think this is?”

“Yeah,” Michael sighed, “It’s a forum about board games and anime. I really hope it’s just some guys playing pretend, building a magic system for their board games but… some of the stuff they write about is just too suspiciously similar to how the dung—helldiving works.”

“Alright, I’ll get some people on it. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? You seem out of sorts.”

“I think I will.” Michael said with a yawn, “I really think I will.”

***

The next day saw Michael up bright and early, more out of habit than anything else. He did his exercises, ate and then healed himself back to maximum health, then went to check his phone. He had more people to heal, apparently, and then he had a scheduled practice run at the dungeon. He wasn’t going to go to the second floor just yet, the situation was a mess down there and he didn’t feel confident in his current skills to handle it, instead choosing to do some shallower dives on the first floor to train.

As the car drove him to the hospital where he would be healing his patients, he idly fiddled with the orange skill stone he had gotten in the dungeon. It was not his first rare one—the first had been [Voice of Command], but it was the first he really got to examine with his powerful magic sense. What he saw… didn’t make much sense at all. Not that the other skill stones made sense, nor did the fractals he saw in his soul. But they were familiar. This skill stone was just strange. It was chock full of mana, Qi and traces of other things, elemental energies included.

After a while, he decided that staring at the stone was not going to reveal any more secrets about it, and he decided to absorb it. Before he did so, he felt his phone vibrate.

A message from my sister? What does she want?

It was beyond rare that he got messages from any of his family, and even though his relationship with his sister was the least strained of them all, it was still a far cry from a healthy one. Reading the message, she seemed to just be asking him what’s up. Odd.

Holding down the little microphone icon, Michael decided to respond with an audio message. “Hi Maggie! I’m doing fine. Nothing much, really. Just lots of work, but I’m making decent money now.”

“Really?” Came the response via text, “I can’t believe you finally got a real job! Congratulations!”

Michael could hear the sarcastic tone even though he was reding written text. Still, he smiled a bit. Even though his relationship with his sister was strained, it wasn’t their fault. It was their situation that had caused them to drift apart over time, taking different stances about important things about their family.

Another text soon appeared. “Does this mean I can finally come over to visit?”

Michael felt pressure in his chest for a moment. Then, he calmed himself down, taking a deep breath.

“Perhaps not yet,” he replied, “I still need to get settled down. I’m still living in the same ran-down apartment, you know?”

“Yuck. Not coming there,” Maggie replied back.

Michael smiled. “Thought you’d say that. Listen. Things might be looking well for the future. How about I invite you over once I move to a better place?”

This would give him time to think things though, and decide what to show his sister. Besides, he hadn’t lied to her about the apartment. He still lived in that crappy, cramped and damp sorry excuse for an apartment he had rented with what little money his old job paid him. It would still be a while before he could move out, but not too long either. Money could expedite many things, and it was only a matter of time before the property he was buying was fully his and work could begin in earnest.

In the end, Michael arrived at the private hospital without having dealt with the orange skill stone. It felt heavy in his pocket, like it could burn a hole through the fabric of his pants. He also felt like everyone’s eyes were on the tiny rotund bulge that could be seen as he walked, as if everyone knew what the easily mistakeable shape really was. As if everyone was planning to take it from him.

He quickened his pace, reaching the room adjacent to where the patients were resting. There were three people on the other side. Before, only one of them would have been in range on his skill, the range being a measly half meter according to the skill description, or 1.6 feet. But now the range was 5 meters, a whopping ten times larger than before.

Making sure to only affect the three people resting on the hospital beds on the other side of the wall and nobody else, Michael let a trickle of healing energy pour through. He could tell, even without touching them or seeing them, that their condition was improving rapidly. When he cut the healing, two of them were still sick but much better than before, while one had completely recovered.

According to the file in front of him, the recovered patient was a Japanese man, friends with Mr Naoshida—the man whose daughter had been the very first test subject of his healing.

“He did pay a pretty penny for the healing too,” said Old Dave later, when Michael emerged from the empty room to report to Dr Kavins. He had been surprised to see the old man here, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been. It was, after all, his job to manage Michael’s assets now. His new job, now that he didn’t have to manage the pawn shop anymore. The old man had taken the loss in stride, more than Michael would have thought, simply handing the reins of the shop to Mustang, of all people.

It soon became evident, by his competence, that Dave’s real calling was this business. The pawn shop had been his retirement, a way to pass time in his twilight years. Now that he was all healed up, more energetic than ever, he was back to doing what he did best. Michael liked to think that he also did it with a new purpose compared to his criminal-aligned years.

“Does it help our finances, then?” Michael asked.

“Yeap,” Old Dave grinned. “Finder’s fee plus the stipend you’re paying me as your COO-thingy? You’re making me rich!”

Michael sighed, but a hint of a smile appeared on his face. “That’s not our finances. That’s your finances.”

Old Dave feigned ignorance. “Oh? Do excuse me, I must have heard wrong. Our finances, meaning your finances managed by me… I’m making this into a corporation soon enough, by the way, so think of a name. Well, they still suck. Since, like you asked, I am not purchasing anything on credit anymore and neither am I asking Mr Tyrell for money—that would be a waste of a perfectly good bunch of favors the man owes you, things might be slowing down a little.”

“How slow, exactly?”

“Well,” the man scratched his chin, “the land will be yours tomorrow, if everything goes as it should. The crew, bulldozers and trucks with dirt and gravel will be there the moment the deed is done. We are looking at the road to the dungeon ready in a week tops. Then we’ll put some quad bikes for you and whoever needs to go back and forth from the parking lot to the dungeon. That’s the temporary solution, at least.”

“Well, sounds like we are on schedule.”

“For the road, yes. The other two patients will pay for the container house and preliminary work at the parking lot site, bringing more supplies over. And they will pay for the security people we are hiring. Trusted and competent goons aren’t cheap.

“Then we need a couple more containers, more trusted people to work for us, and we can begin moving the headquarters there. After the road is done, of course. But making the foundations for the actual buildings will have to wait. Not just because building stuff from scratch is expensive and you don’t want to go in the red again, but also because we need to hook it all up to water, sewage, electricity and gas pipes. That’s… I need Mr Tyrell’s help with that. Or at least his secretary.”

Michael nodded. “I can work with this, it’s not like we are in a hurry.”

“Are we not?” Dave asked.

“It’s not so bad that I need to go into debt, Dave. It was bad enough the first time around. I recognize that it made me act a bit too rashly.”

“Huh, you’re growing. I can’t say I dislike it, even though you are making my life harder. But then again, I am here to make your life easier and not the other way around. I guess shipping container house for you and container offices for us will have to make do for now. Forget your idea of having a science lab to study magic for now, though. That shit’s expensive.”

Suddenly Michael’s pocket burned. It was all in his mind, he knew, but it was as if the skill stone suddenly weighted a million tons. That, and he was painfully aware of the many magical stones he had taken from the golem’s territory and back to the real world, sitting in a secure storage somewhere. Secure yes, but from mundane threats, surely not from someone with magic sight and magic skills.

“How is the situation in the dungeon?” Dave asked.

“It’s crap, but we can talk about it later.”

“Right.” The man said, a bit taken aback by Michael’s strangely composed behavior since—to him—it was barely a week ago that Michael was just a naïve brat. “How about the mana leaking out?”

Michael checked his phone, where a map had several pins to show the various readings he took with his magic sense. “It’s reached 1.6 miles.”

“And the monsters you saw lurking around?”

“Still lurking. They are doing nothing, right now.”

“But who knows for how long that’ll hold true.” Dave hummed. “We don’t know how much time we have. I heard that you asked Mr Tyrell to look into a couple of things for you. Smart move. Those forum posts you found might be the best lead we have on finding other dungeons. We are also trying to locate the man you saw at the diner what, two or three weeks ago? Hard, but not impossible. I suspect that once we do find other places and other people with powers, things will get much more hectic. You’ll regret taking it easy then.”

Michael was about to open his mouth to retort but Old Dave beat him to it, a slight grimace to his face adding wrinkles and years to him.

“But then again, you can’t be expected to operate like a machine. You are just a man, after all. I know you must feel some sort of pressure. Hell, I feel it and I’m not at the center of all this like you are. Don’t burn yourself out, alright?”