Chương 17: 16-Reset

"What the hell happened?" asked Dawn, as she watched Corila's face grimace in pain. She was one of the students in her class. She was on the floor, surrounded by a group of youngsters. Her left leg was bent in an unnatural shape.

"She said her powers allowed her to fly, and she did," Tol explained.

"She floated thirty feet into the air. She looked ecstatic. Then, she looked down, panicked, and lost control. You can imagine the rest. Can you do something about it, Dawn?" That would have been a dumb question two days ago. Not anymore. She had been gaining levels nonstop on the second wave of activations today. All the students in the hall were already activated, each with a different power. Her levels had soared, stopping only at 99. That was her maximum.

As she gained stats, her psychokinetic powers grew immensely, not only in sheer strength but also in precision and control. She could do anything as long as she could envision it as a product of telekinetic manipulation. She sat down beside Corila, who was weeping with shame, anger, and pain.

"Shush, relax now," she softly said as she envisioned the nerves in her left leg. She could imagine the neural impulses going up and down those channels. She wished them to stop. Corila sighed as her whole leg went numb.

"Go to sleep," she said, massaging the reticular formation in Corila's brain with her mind, inducing sleep with her magic. Then she imagined the leg, trying to make the vision as realistic as possible. The femur was broken in two places, and a splinter of bone had severed an artery, causing some internal bleeding. She willed the blood to flow back into her circulatory system and sealed the severed artery back.

Then she wished the bone to reseal, and she enhanced Corila's cells until they could, in seconds, perform the healing processes that normally take many weeks. She finally allowed neural impulses to travel again through the nerves in Corila's leg and jolted her brain awake. Both women opened their eyes at the same time. Corila's leg was whole. All the students were looking at her in awe.

"Is there nothing you can't do?" Tol told her.

"Plenty of things," Dawn answered, as she helped a grateful Corila stand up on her feet.

"I can't seem to find my idiot boyfriend or that old relic he is so infatuated with, for once."

"I am pretty sure they are in Arimel's laboratory," another girl said.

"Arimel sent me to look for him this morning."

"Do you really have to go there?" Tol asked.

"We are all pretty scared after that dungeon manifested. Could another one do the same?"

"No, Tol, it won't. I am holding all Essence away from the University with my mind," she explained.

"You can rest easy." Oops. That had been the wrong thing to say, she suddenly realized, as the students looked at her with even more veneration. Whatever. She had things to do. She left the mess hall and headed for the labs. There was something important she had to share with those two. Something significant. A possible solution to their problems. The laboratory door was locked. She was not surprised to find out that her key no longer worked. It seems she was no longer trusted by Arimel. Absurd.

Locked doors were a problem for the old Dawn. The door opened itself with the gentlest push of her will. She found her boyfriend and her erstwhile teacher sitting on their haunches, facing each other, arms extended, palms touching, a look of intense concentration on both their faces. She waited patiently until they finished doing whatever they were doing. She did not want to know. Finally, both opened their eyes and stood up, looking slightly disoriented.

"I need the Icosahedron. Now," she coldly told Arimel.

"What do you want it for?" Arimel answered, taken aback.

"You still can't predict what I am going to do, can you, Professor?" Dawn told him.

"Must be fraying your nerves. We are all like little lab mice to you, aren't we? The experiment is over. I am going to stop this madness."

"What are you talking about, Dawn?" Ahura told her, confusion plainly written on his face. Dawn considered for a moment whether he deserved an explanation. She sighed. If she started acting all high and mighty, she was not so different from Arimel.

"I got a new power as soon as I hit 99, which I think is my maximum rank. It is called Reset. I am going to use it on the Icosahedron," she explained.

"If we are lucky, I may destroy it. If not, I should at least be able to deactivate it."

"You can't do that, Dawn!" Ahura wailed.

"The Icosahedron is the only thing holding Limbo from destroying all reality in three days. We must finish activating it. It is the only way we can save the day."

"Save the day?" Dawn shouted.

"We have destroyed our world!"

"And we will destroy much more than that if we do not finish the process. We have seen it. An ally from the future has warned us," Arimel hurriedly explained.

"Show me this ally. I want to talk with him," Dawn answered.

"He will not come when you are near. Your presence distorts my powers," Arimel almost pleaded.

"How convenient. You are both sick," Dawn sighed and then pushed them forcefully against the wall, holding both their bodies there with her mind. The Icosahedron floated out of Arimel's robes and placed itself on Dawn's open palm.

"No, Dawn, what are you going to do?" Ahura screamed.

"I am going to try to save those we have not already killed," she answered Ahura with contempt. Then she dived inside her own mind and activated the reset power, while focusing on the artifact in her right hand. Darkness took her. When she woke up, she was lying in a cramped cell, covered with a reinforced glass pane. It had small holes to let in air. She had seen this place before. Where? She felt horrible, her body was weak, and her thoughts were slow and muddy.

The colors had changed too: they were gray and drab, stripped of the vividness they once had. Sounds were garbled and hard to understand. Arimel was on the other side of the pen, scribbling notes on a little black ledger.

"What have you done to me? Why do I feel like this? Have you drugged me?" she croaked, calling for his attention.

"You have done it to yourself," Arimel answered without raising his eyes from the ledger.

"Open your status screen, and you will understand." Dawn did as she was instructed. Her screen had changed. Rank 1 (00%) Each rank will add 20% to your base potential. If the rank is a multiple of 5, it will be considered your new base potential. Gift: Learning 1 Gift: System Vector 1 (acquired through Alpha). Can be used once per day to activate another sentient being.

"What is the meaning of this? Where is my psychokinesis power? Where are all my levels?" she demanded angrily.

"The reset power was not for the Icosahedron, Dawn," Arimel told her, not unkindly.

"It was for yourself. You have reset yourself to level zero, factory settings, as one could say."

"And for the weakness, the clumsiness, and the slow, plodding way your thoughts crawl now along your brain, I am afraid to tell you that is your base threshold. You were a demigod five minutes ago. You are merely yourself once again," Arimel chuckled.

"Memories are recent enough to allow comparisons. Do not worry, in a couple of days, you will forget what being superhuman felt like." The door opened, and Ahura went in. His face darkened as he saw where Dawn was kept. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Is this really necessary, professor?" he asked.

"Of course it is," Arimel answered blandly.

"It is the only holding facility we have, and we can't let her roam free for the next few hours. She could interfere, even without her levels. We will release her tomorrow morning." Dawn then realized where she was being held. It was one of the holding cells Arimel used for the primates he experimented on. At least he had the decency of having put her in a clean one.

"Okay.. 541… here it is," Arimel said, mumbling to himself as he got a test tube from a glass dispenser that held hundreds of them.

"Let's go, we have a lot to do before tonight," the professor said, heading for the exit.

"Please, at least tell me what is going on," Dawn pleaded as they were both about to exit the room. Both men stopped for a moment. Dawn looked pleadingly at Arimel, who shrugged. Then Ahura turned to face Dawn.

"The Icosahedron is only half-functional. We must finish activating it," Ahura told her, as Arimel waited patiently for him to finish.

"One of us must reach level 100 and become something called the Omega. That marks the end of the cycle. He will lead the process from now on, living outside our world and introducing the compendium to others," Ahura could not hold her gaze.

"Hold on, do you mean we are going to do to other worlds what we have done to ours?" Dawn asked incredulously.

"It is the only way, Dawn," Arimel told her sadly.

"Our world was doomed the moment the System activated in it. It still has years in it, but it will eventually succumb to the forces we have unleashed. Our civilization will become extinct. But others will live thanks to our sacrifice."

"Ahura, you can't mean that, you are better than this," Dawn begged, almost crying.

"Do you want to start a never-ending chain of genocide?"

"No, Dawn, you are wrong. This artifact did not come to us so that we could become monsters, but saviors. Without us, the whole of creation would have fallen to Limbo. The Icosahedron is our only hope. We would be doomed without it," Ahura answered sadly.

"I know you do not feel like a hero. Frankly, neither do I," he said, looking at the floor. He could not meet her eyes.

"But like it or not, we are," he said as he exited the room, not even throwing a last look at her.

"I will stop you, Arimel," she vowed as she was about to leave, too.

"I will even if it is the last thing I do."

"No, Dawn, you won't," he told her, almost kindly. Damn it, couldn't he gloat a little? He was supposed to be the villain.

"You gain powers using a very different system from us. You level faster, but you need to activate others to do so. There is no one left to activate in this building, Dawn," he said as he closed the door.

"And even if there were, they would not help you. I have shown them the future. They are with me. They know this must be done." Dawn heard Arimel's last words, coming muffled through the door.

"It is necessary." Dawn sat down, her head between her hands, trying to think her way out of her current predicament. Arimel was right. There was no one for her to activate. For all purposes, she was, and would remain, human. She needed to be more. The shadows in the lab changed positions as the sun sailed across the sky. She was hungry, thirsty, and bored to death. She could also use some loo time. How long did they intend to keep her here? A glimmer of an idea suddenly fluttered through her mind. Could it be?

She summoned her status screen, placed her hands on her chest, and tried to activate herself. Her head screamed in agony, as if her brain was placed in a vise. She fell to her knees, panting, but not wholly disheartened. For an instant, she could feel… something, a slight resistance to her will. And where there was something that resisted, there was something to push against. She tried again, burrowing through a pain so exquisite that it erased all other sensations from her. She fell to the ground.

For an instant, she saw a flash of blue light before losing consciousness. She woke ten minutes later, feeling as if her mind and body had gone through a grinder. She summoned her status screen. Nothing. Suddenly, she froze. A flash of blue. Could it be the screen? She tried again, but this time she kept her status screen open throughout the process. As the pain began to increase, it blurred and changed.

Choose a starting power: Vision Mimic Psychokinesis Electrokinesis Blink Metabolic control Illusion Density Control Telepathy Body Alteration Enhanced Mnemonics Language Mastery Gravity Control Magnetism Construct Summoning Hypnosis She suddenly understood. It was so simple she did not understand how she could have missed it. She had obtained her psychokinetic power from the first student she had enhanced.

She did not obtain any power from her first two subjects, Arimel and Ahura, because the system was inactive when she triggered them. The list of powers was based on the abilities she had granted to others. There were more students and more powers, but it seemed she could access only those she had activated in person, not by proxy. This was the reason activating herself was so painful: she had to choose a power from that list before doing so.

She did not miss the fact that Arimel's and Ahura's powers were now on the list, despite not being able to acquire them when she first granted them. She had a feeling this point would prove significant later. She considered her options carefully. She couldn't level up. It had to be a power capable of freeing her from the cell, at its most basic level. She tried to envision the students who had acquired those powers and what they could achieve with them. She remembered Lin, the blinking girl.

She had managed to teleport two feet on her first try. She had passed out from exhaustion, but two feet was more than enough to free her from this cell. She chose Blink and activated herself. After all the agony she had been through for the past hours, the process being so painless took her by surprise. Now or never, she thought, as she willed to be on the other side of the glass pane. Nothing. These damn powers never came with an instruction manual. Perhaps, it was not so much a matter of will as of visualization.

Could Blink be based on a different way of perceiving space? Just as she thought of it, everything changed: her paltry three spatial dimensions split into many more. She felt a brief pang of nausea as her three-dimensional view of the world expanded into something infinitely more complex. Why had she ever thought she was trapped? The cage barred her way if she moved West, but she did not have to go that way—she could go Weorthp. She moved in a direction that should not have existed, leaving the cage behind.

Then, her perception returned to normal. She collapsed to her knees, retching the last of her supper. She rose on unsteady legs and approached the table where Arimel had been working. She took the ledger and began to read. The secrets of dungeons and essence were clearly explained in Arimel's tidy hand. The book was a treasure, but one to be studied later. All the different dungeon tags discovered by Arimel were clearly ordered by number. That was the one he was looking for.

She cross-referenced with trembling hands and found the tag description: Altar: Experience released inside this dungeon through violent means is not instantly converted into essence. If the dungeon implodes while filled with Experience, it will be absorbed by any Experientials present inside it during the event. The conversion ratio is very low. Most of the Experience will be lost. Dawn pocketed the ledger inside her dress and sat down, trying to absorb what she had learned.

Arimel needed one Omega to complete the process. That was a lot of levels, too many to gain in a couple of days. Then, she understood what he was trying to do. If the dungeon implodes filled with Experience. Filled with Experience—Experience came from people. Such as the students currently inside the dungeon. He was going to kill all of them. She swore, pocketed the ledger, and opened the door of the lab. Ahura was waiting outside, an uneasy look on his face.

"You were here all this time?" she asked incredulously.

"Of course not, I came to check on you," he answered defensively.

"I still care for you, Dawn, even if you…"

"Shut up and read this," Dawn cut him off mid-sentence, pointing to the description of the tag.

"Where is the bloody dungeon, Ahura?"

"You can see it from the north side of the building. He used his powers to determine the precise spot where to plant the spore to guarantee it would grow up," he said hurriedly.

"But what is he trying to do? Why that tag?"

"Isn't it obvious, Ahura? He is going to kill all of you for experience!" she screamed at him.

"He is going to become the first Omega and end the first cycle."

"Tell me, Ahura,""Do you still feel like a hero?" Ahura's face blanched.

"No, he would never do that. He cares for those kids. There must be an explanation." They ran towards the cafeteria, which had a clear view of the university's northern side. A gleaming tower of basalt, taller than the University's tallest building, had magically manifested there.

"How has it grown so much?" asked Ahura.

"It was only 20 feet high ten minutes ago."

"Because he has already started killing those kids, Ahura. Their essence is empowering the dungeon," Dawn said.

"He needs to kill all of them if the process is so inefficient and he expects to get fifty levels out of it." Ahura's face darkened. His body shifted into a winged form made of steel and fury.

"I am going to confront him," he said in a weird metallic voice that was somehow still his own.

"No, darling, please, not like that. He is a seer. He will know you are coming," Dawn wept. The last events had pulled them apart, but she discovered in that moment that she still cared deeply for him.

"I will return with an explanation and the kids," the winged beast told her. He flew through the reinforced glass windows like a bullet through a piece of paper. Dawn fell on her knees and prayed. There was nothing else she could do. She saw her boyfriend's metallic shape enter the tower through one of its openings. She waited. And waited. And waited. Hours or seconds could have passed. And then many things happened at once. The whole tower transformed into a ball of fire.

For the first time, a monstrous voice echoed from everywhere at once. You have hit the maximum level. You are the Omega. Choose your name. And another one answered him. She could clearly hear him even though he was not present. It was not a triumphant voice. It was sad, tired, and almost resigned. Arimel's"My name is Necessity." Dawn knew at that moment that she would never see Ahura again.

"Arimel, you fucking murderer," she swore.

"I will hunt you."

"I will hunt you for all eternity."