Chương 21: 20-Escape from Erela

A long, long time ago Dawn closed the door to her improvised hiding place and prayed for one more day undiscovered. She knew that if Arimel hadn't locked her inside his lab, she would already be dead. Arimel had kept secrets, even from his own colleagues. There was a hidden room on one side of the lab that appeared to be a vivisection station. Dawn remembered the professor obsessing for years over the influence of eidocytes on living tissue.

He had built that hidden room to perform animal experiments, which would probably never have been approved through official channels. Nothing stopped Arimel in his search for science. Not the University statutes, not ethics, not regulations, not even the lives of his students and colleagues. Dawn started to cry as she remembered Ahura charging into what would soon become a blazing inferno. Eventually, sadness was replaced by a cold, relentless conviction.

Arimel had destroyed her world and had murdered her fiancé and her students. Even worse, he had made her complicit in his crimes. He had done it to save the universe, becoming the first Immortal ascended by the Icosahedron. How convenient. She was trapped now. Trapped in a closed, dying world with no access to the System. Trapped inside a body with mortal attributes and pitiful powers, and no way to improve them. Or not? There was something significant, an important detail she was missing.

When she activated herself, she had access to powers she did not obtain when activating others. She remembered clearly Ahura's shapeshifting ability and Arimel's prophetic one to be in the list. But she had only acquired her psychokinetic power when the System was already active. She could still summon her status screen. She detected a tiny alteration: the word"Locked" appeared next to her system vector gift, the one that allowed her to activate others. Locked. Something had changed.

She felt it in her bones, a few minutes after Arimel ascended, as if reality were a door suddenly snapping shut. She tried to use her System Vector power. It felt different. Contained, as if it had been chained to the inside of her mind. She knew she would not be able to use it on others. It refused to move when ordered. It didn't need to extend outside her body if she was the target. She had spent a long time exploring the lab and crying, and her system vector power had already reset.

She turned it inwards and pushed. She felt her body spasm, and darkness swallowed her. When she woke up, she was level 3. She could level up, even without a System empowering her world. It would take much longer, as she was limited to one level every 24 hours, but she could do it. Arimel, you bastard. I am coming for you. The following days felt like a waking nightmare.

She had locked herself inside the autopsy room with four huge bags of kibble she had obtained from the animal pen and several gallons of distilled water from the laboratory. She spent most of her time in darkness, praying that she would not be discovered by the Essentials now freely roaming the streets. Now and then, she would be woken by human screams in the distance. They became less and less frequent as the days passed. To her shame, she felt grateful for it.

She was once woken by the sound of something not human, trampling around in the room at the other side of the hidden door. It sounded big and powerful, its steps resounding on the floor as it moved furniture around with no apparent effort. Dawn put her ear to the wall, trying to track its movements by sound. There was a subtle noise, something she had not been able to hear before. Sniffing. The creature had tracked her scent. Dawn soiled herself. After what seemed an eternity, it gave up and left.

Dawn checked her status screen—the cooldown was off. She was already level seven, but she doubted it would allow her to survive outside her refuge. She raised her levels again, praying that she would not be discovered until she was strong enough to defend herself. She hit level 10 three days later, effectively quadrupling her base human potential. She was nearly out of water, and the room was heavy with the stench of her waste.

Whenever she felt on the verge of falling into despair, Arimel's face would appear in her mind's eye, washing away all emotions and replacing them with cold determination. She heard the monster she called the Sniffer enter the next room for the third time in the past few days. She was not so terrified anymore. The monster was fixated on her scent. It knew an Experiential had been in this room, and was trying to track it.

Its actions followed a script: it would sniff around for 10 minutes, howl in fury, and leave the room, then try to track the smell again in a different location. This time it was different. Its fingers latched on the hidden door that protected her from the monsters. Dawn felt a moment of panic, but then her rational self asserted itself. Unlocking that door is a complex procedure with three different steps. There is no way a dumb beast working on instinct could perform it. Who said Essentials were dumb beasts?

With a roar of triumph, the beast opened the door, sliding it aside. Dawn could clearly see its figure against the light, a stocky, six-foot-tall humanoid, covered in bristles, with four long arms extending from its torso and ending in wicked claws. It was headless, but a huge vertical mouth filled with fangs ran along its torso. The mouth opened, and a six-foot tongue emerged from it, making the sniffing sounds that had terrorized her too much.

They say that your fears are always worse than the things that inspire them. Not always, Dawn found. Snap out of it, you are not powerless, she berated herself. She sought the magic inside her and wished for it to take her out of that place. Reality screamed as she tore through it. She woke up ten minutes later, lying on a cold stone floor. She had teleported nearly two hundred feet up to the rooftop. She knew she could not remain there—she was too exposed.

Many Essentials could fly, and by remaining on the rooftop, she was announcing herself as the next snack. Yet, her hiding hole had been discovered. She had no place to run to. But she did not have to run, did she? Lying in the dark, praying not to be discovered, had not allowed her to test her powers, but now the situation had changed. She had blacked out after blind teleporting 200 feet, but she had succeeded. She was sure it would be much easier if she could see where she was going and try shorter jumps.

Time was on her side; she only had to remain alive. She began scanning the campus, looking for a safe spot to retreat to. A huge inverted dungeon had sprouted in the middle of it. It looked like an eerie landscape dotted with holes. She saw an Essential fly over it, some kind of giant hornet. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. A tentacle shot from one of the holes and dragged it under. Definitely not there. She could see her apartment block from here.

If she focused on it and planned the trip, she could probably teleport directly inside it. It looked pretty quiet. Essentials tended to be a boisterous bunch—with some luck, no dungeon would have appeared inside the building. Then, she suddenly realized she could not leave. She had left something precious in the lab: Arimel's ledger. She had been in the dark the whole time and hadn't had the chance to read it, but it contained essential information if she wanted to face him.

Calm yourself, you do not even have to go back to that room. You can even snatch it back from here. You saw Lin do things like that. On the other hand, Lin, the original blinking girl, had been level 18 when she did it. She could not afford to spend one week on this rooftop to catch up. Whatever she did, she had to do now. She sat down in the lotus position and emptied her mind. She envisioned Arimel's ledger, on the same desk it had been standing when she was imprisoned inside the lab.

She thought about the path she would have to follow to reach that same spot on foot. Her 3D vision was nearly perfect now, a product of her enhanced intellect and her dimensional powers. The path took form inside her mind, a shining line zigzagging in three dimensions. She envisioned it. It was so crude, so inefficient. She willed it to change, becoming a straight line, and then she shortened it. She compressed it with her mind until it became a single point, floating in front of the mind's eye.

With a final push of will, she thrust her hand towards that point, and space folded in on itself, a rift the size of a manhole cover appearing in front of her. Arimel's ledger was lying on the other side. She had done it! She had mastered her power. For the first time in many days, she thought for a moment she could make it alive out of this situation. With a grunt, she thrust her right arm through the rift, grasping the ledger. An inhuman hand closed on her wrist and pulled her effortlessly through the rift.

She fell in a heap at the feet of the Sniffer. The beast howled in victory. It had finally caught its prey. Dawn could not even scream. The beast's four arms had grabbed her by her wrists and her ankles, and its tongue had wrapped itself around her neck, exerting crushing force. Only her enhanced stats kept her conscious. She saw the tip of the tongue waggle in front of her face. It suddenly peeled back like a flower, revealing a hidden eye inside.

Dawn could almost hear Arimel's laughter as the Essential slowly pulled her, feet first, towards its open maw. It was going to make it last. Something cold and powerful filled her— No! My story does not end today! It will finish when Arimel's does! Then she summoned her powers and used them to look at the Sniffer. With a squelching sound, her mind broke free of her three-dimensional limitations.

She could see inside the Sniffer, all its organs, its central brain located in its torso, its three hearts pumping some viscous liquid through its circulatory system. It was not x-ray vision; she could see inside it because her mind now possessed one more spatial dimension than the reality around her. She could see inside the great, circulatory vessel that received blood from the three hearts and distributed it along the beast's body.

She opened a rift inside it, no wider than a coin—she didn't care where the blood would go. Suddenly, a great geyser of green ichor erupted from the drain in the sink to her left, staining the ceiling. It kept pumping blood in great spurts. The eye on the Sniffer's tongue watched the green fountain curiously, not aware it was its own blood, being pumped by its three powerful hearts out of its body. Then, with an almost delicate sound, it released Dawn and fell dead at her feet. The lab fell silent.

She collapsed on the floor. She refused to be afraid. She had taken this beast with only 10 levels. She only had to wait. She only had to survive. Each day that passed, this world held one less horror for her. Three Months Later Dawn finished reading Arimel's ledger. The man was a genius; there was no doubt about that. He had categorized more than 600 different metaphysical properties available to dungeons, which he generically referred to as 'tags.'

There was also a veritable trove of information concerning the Icosahedron and what he called the Compendium, some kind of cosmic algorithm which the artifact would somehow both generate and hold. She was also aware of how desperate her situation was. She was locked in a dying world, with no way of leaving it. According to Arimel, there were thousands of other planes of existence, but they could be accessed only through the Compendium, which held a map to them all.

She could not understand how Arimel had obtained such information until she discovered some notes on the last page. The information had been given by a being called Necessity, the very same being Arimel had ascended to. He had contacted his future self and asked for his guidance. Her powers had increased enormously along with her level over these last weeks. She could now see inside her mind all of the space around her for hundreds of miles. It was easy to filter out zones that did not meet her requirements.

That was how she had discovered this hiding place, safely located inside a bank vault. She had filled it with gallons of drinkable water and food. Most of Arimel's equipment, including his collection of dungeon spores classified by tags, had become part of her vault. She had also created two permanent rifts, leading to different time zones. She had tuned them so that only light could pass in. She always had sunlight now inside her vault.

As a last step, she created a different rift that would allow her to go out of the vault, bypassing the metal doors. These rifts would last forever, even if she renounced her dimensional powers. More importantly, the Reset button reappeared when she reached level 99. She could stay now in the husk of her world with no fear of the Essentials. Two days ago, she had strolled down the campus, trying to find more survivors. She had been attacked by hordes of monsters. It had been trivial to dispose of them.

She had only to think of it, and they vanished, reappearing over the eerie alien landscape and its hungry tentacles. She had fed it monsters until it could eat no more. For all her efforts, she could not find any other living Erelan. Her homeland was a graveyard, and she was trapped in it. Along with the levels, her intellect had climbed to new heights. She could teleport all over her planet in the blink of an eye, but that would not let her escape it.

Her enhanced intelligence showed her the way: if she had to fight her enemy, she would have to use his same tools. She no longer feared the dark. She teleported back into her hiding hole, lay on the bed, and summoned her status screen. She mentally pushed the reset button. She spent the rest of the day studying her screen, considering her choices. She did not really have that many of them. Any of the powers in the list guaranteed her survival, but so did her actual one. She was not trying merely to survive.

She wanted out of this bloody world; nothing held her here anymore. Arimel was no longer in it. She had to play the same trick Arimel had used: use prophecy as a tool. She did not have to think of a way to leave this plane—she only had to envision one future in which she had. She felt humbled. She knew she had an exceptional intellect and had always been proud of it. For the first time in her life, she realized what a limited, coarse tool intelligence was when faced with the mysteries of the universe.

Ninety-nine days later Dawn sat on her favorite chair, her mind scanning thousands of possible timelines at the same time, living a myriad lives in a second. She grew mad with frustration, trying to escape her jail in most of them. She started to filter out these ones. There! There was a way out, an escape from Erela. It was one she would have never seen without Arimel's prophetic powers. She concentrated on this timeline and saw it split into multiple others, most of which ended in her death.

She was murdered again and again by agents of something that would one day be called the Compendium. As soon as they detected her, they sent someone. Sometimes she slew her assassin, only to fall to the next one. There was only one way out: She had to hold to these powers. She had to use them to avoid danger and keep herself alive for a long, long time. If she lived thousands of lives protected by prophecy, she would learn.

And someday, her experience and knowledge would be so great that she would not need fate holding her hand to survive anything the compendium could throw at her. She would endure ten million resets. She would learn everything. And then she would choose. All powers in her list would be open to her. But first, she had a dragon to appease. She picked the right test tube from Arimel's collection, guided by her visions. Then she planted it in the spot she knew would make the tube grow into a full dungeon.

She waited for months until it absorbed all the local Essence, eventually reaching the seventh rank and entering it. She climbed down flights of stairs, knowing what she would find at the end of them. Prophets traded surprise for fatalism. Finally, she reached the one she sought. She saw its massive bulk climb out of the lake and heard its voice inside her mind. It sounded like a young girl.

"Naughty, naughty Dawn," it said.

"We are going to be good friends."