Limitless

by John Gold

  Human, Veresal, Level 3491

  He quickly realizes who I am, and he pulls up a shield as he hides behind the archmage. I’m surprised he doesn’t have anything to indicate his divine status, although technically, he isn’t a god anymore.

  “What do you need, murderer? And how did you even get here? Wanderers aren’t permitted in the land of the dead.”

  “One of the divine brotherhood killed my whole family near Airis Castle. I came to look for them.”

  The archmage hurriedly buffs himself, and I pull out my shield. The blade of my bone sword slides easily out of my palm.

  “And what do you want from us?”

  “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t kill Veresal. I have enough rage in my soul for ten gods, and I’m going to work on killing them all until I get back what I lost.”

  The archmage smiles, and the patron god relaxes.

  “Well, that’s pointless. We can’t die here.”

  Hm, that’s true.

  “You probably haven’t heard the latest from the outside world. I can send the souls of my enemies to Hell when I want to now—Bernard gave me quite a bit of interesting information about the ritual.”

  I’m bluffing, and I can’t send their souls to Hell, but they don’t know that. After pushing the archmage and the old man behind him for a few minutes, I get something worth more than life itself. Sagie, I’m not going to write what they gave me. Let me just tell you that I let them go in peace. Who knows who else might be reading this?

  We part ways, none of us letting the others out of our sight until the familiar gray haze separates us. I step into the shroud with a quiver of anticipation.

  Current location: House of Disgust.

  The semidarkness around me is dimly illuminated by smoky torches on the walls. The floor is made out of…flesh! Thousands of arms and legs went into it, while the walls are hung with the heads of corpses. I remember almost all of them. There are lots that I killed during rituals, the bodies from the Stygian swamps, the pirates who attacked our ship, and thousands of monsters who have found their way onto my altars. The location is well-named.

  After six hours spent wandering the labyrinth made out of living flesh, I’m able to sense a gleam of disgust. I don’t come across many opponents, though they’re awfully hard to make out in the darkened maze. Black robes blend into the shadows, their ability to move with absolute silence making it even harder to spot them, and all I can think about is how much killing I’ve done over the years. Thousands, hundreds of thousands have been sacrificed to build my strength.

  On the second day, I find my way out of the labyrinth and walk out onto the surface.

  Current location: House of Disgust. Storm Fields of Suffering.

  Blood rains down. The ground is covered in a carpet made of thousands of dead bodies, and the bloody streams bathe their hair, soak their clothes, and gurgle revoltingly past their legs. The bare limbs are slippery. I feel the disgust setting in as I squelch along, killing half-dead assailants in a rain that makes my nose itch.

  “Panacea! Maximum!”

  I already have experience with this kind of trial, so I decide to just take it head on. My death chimera ends up being a snake rather than a dog, as practice has shown that bone hounds slip a lot on bloody fields. Snakes, on the other hand, can slide along smoothly, eating everyone they come across.

  I also sew myself a cloak with the bobcat skins I got in Crazyman’s Forest. Now I’m warm, and I can move leisurely across the hills of bodies sitting on the back of my enormous snake. In just the first day I get all the way to the Fields of Loathing. The blood is up to my knees, slurping around my feet, so I get back onto the snake and keep moving toward the source of the disgust.

  The farther I go, the more hideous I find everything. In the end, I just have to stop and grow a tree so I can make a small sensory deprivation chamber under the roots. I need to work on the control I have over my emotions. Everything I’m feeling here in the Fields of Blood can be wrapped up in just one word: disgust.

  There isn’t a map, but my experience tells me I’m already halfway through. Every enemy I kill fosters even greater abhorrence inside me, and I have to keep fighting it back. It gets much easier after my second hour in my stone room. Ten hours later, I’m ready to keep going.

  It’s an endless field of blood and lone figures who die after just one or two attacks. Their serious wounds, the revolting way they look at me, the smell of fecal matter, and the nasty murmuring make them the most repugnant bots I’ve ever come across. Even killing from a distance with magic feels like the dirtiest thing I’ve ever done.

  It’s all starting to really get to me when I see a mysterious silhouette spreading across the horizon. Once again, it’s Talamei, only in a different guise. He has black, deer-like antlers jutting out of his bare skull, and there’s a long scarf as red as the surrounding scenery draped around his neck. The worst part is the way his aura gleams orange like a saint’s.

  Thankfully, I notice him before he notices me. And even though my thinking is clouded, I’m still not about to go sticking my head into the lion’s mouth. I spend a day getting used to the stress, after which I spend another day figuring out how I’m going to beat an opponent like that.

  Talamei looks completely different, which means he’s going to have different strengths. Those antlers popping out of his skull are similar to the ones I saw on Azami, the great natural deity.

  While I’m working on my resistance in my sensory deprivation chamber, I think back to how I beat Talamei last time. He probably just got flung out into space, where he threw up a divine shield fed by his astral source. My leap spells are the only kind of teleportation that works here. Because of that, I can’t teleport to the astral or anywhere else, and the leap spell has a limited distance and requires a set destination.

  Suddenly, as I’m puzzling over Talamei, I remember a system message I got when I arrived in the Gray Lands.

  New world structure: 5th level

  Fifth Sequence Limiter activated

  I can only guess what kind of effect the world structure has. Most likely, it has something to do with how seriously the world affects the consciousness, and the physical body through it. The last few resonances I activated revealed a direct relationship with my streams of consciousness: they activate when I have several streams working on a single task with a strong emotional component. From what I can tell, the world outside Project Chrysalis is fourth order. Hell and the Gray Lands are fifth-order worlds. Resonances have gradations, too. The fourth-order resonance I activated near Airis Castle nearly killed me, and just one spell was enough to destroy a fortress the size of a small city and kill all kinds of people. An analogous resonance activated when I sent Talamei into orbit. They boost the effect of the spells by at least a factor of ten, though they also nearly kill me. And the logs tell me that nearly two minutes went by between when the resonance was deactivated and when I received the damage from falling. I even picked up a new achievement.

  Achievement received: Crazy paratrooper. Second rank.

  Survive a fall from a height of at least two kilometers.

  Reward: +20 to all attributes

  As far as lower-level resonances are concerned, the effect is something like cellular instability, though how it actually works is beyond me. Fem told me my lich was able to divide its consciousness up between eleven bodies it could then control. It’s hard for me just to think with so many streams, and it was able to organize them to the point that it slaughtered a whole company of enemies.

  The limiter, it turns out, just affects the natural growth of my attributes. Thanks to it, I was able to get my skills and main attributes up to 200 in Hell, though I can’t get them to budge here no matter how much time I spend jumping around with an amplified body.

  Going back to Talamei, it’s worth noting that killing him turned out to be much simpler than I was expecting. I had an unlimited amount of necrotic energy, a flexible mind, and the experience o
f many similar fights.

  Even back when I was working at the space port, Galboa taught me this one critical principle: always control the situation. That has been my guiding light in battle since then. Whether it’s setting my traps, fighting on my own turf, having an ace up my sleeve, or manipulating my opponents, it’s what I always have in mind.

  It’s easier to think when logic has free rein over your mind without emotion. The fallen god has at least twice the strength, and there are a few other facts to remember as well: he repels maximum damage, his movement is limited, and he’s far too overconfident.

  The first step is the trap. I set up what I need for a ritual I can use twice, and then I send a meteor crashing down on him just like the first time. I knew it didn’t have the caliber to kill him, so I’m not surprised to see the antlered beast crawling out of the crater and hovering over the earth before heading in my direction. The red ribbon around his neck pulses with the raw magic energy surging through it.

  I set the destination for my leap spell and jump over to my second altar, which is a hundred meters away. Just the look of the fallen divinity floating over the earth in the orange light of his divine shield is enough to affect my psyche regardless of the resistance I’ve built up. The aura is just so yellowish-green, the kind I’m used to seeing from healers and priests. He combines life and death in one, and the combination is revolting.

  My second line of attack is strong enough for ten maximum-strength spells. It’s set up under a small tree, giving me the mana I need, and Talamei’s shield takes the brunt of chain lightning, mental spears, fireballs, and even a light hammer.

  The fallen divinity is flying over my first altar when I activate a sphere of darkness. Everything within half a kilometer is bathed in gloom, though he can still see me with his magic vision if I use even one spell. So, I do just that.

  “Leap. Maximum.”

  A divine spear slams into the spot where I was just standing, turning the ritual area and tree into a pile of ruins. But I’m now at my first altar right behind him. His feet and my head are just half a meter apart in the pitch darkness, and I activate my destroyer gift.

  Pick the effect you would like your ritual to have:

  One-time spell amplification

  Your spell will be amplified several times over, depending on how developed your ritual magic skill is.

  Mass undead raising

  All the dead in a radius of 1000 meters will be raised, though they will all take you for an enemy.

  Altar self-destruction

  The altar on which the ritual was performed will self-destruct. The ritual slab will absorb all the necrotic energy, after which it will explode and do mental damage to everything around it.

  I go with the last option and say a prayer in my head that my plan will work. Using just my mind, I activate a gravitational well and send myself hurtling upward through the divine shield. Huh! Apparently, it can be pointed outward or inward.

  As soon as I throw up my own magic shield, I take a hit from a powerful divine whip.

  Damage received: 13750000 (ignored: 25000000)

  38498/38498

  Bastard! The blow demolishes my shield, knocks me out of my gravitational well, and sends me sliding ten meters through the blood with it in my face. I swallow quite a few mouthfuls of the stuff on the way.

  Just like other kinds of divine magic, the whip disintegrated when it struck its target, doing mental damage to everything nearby. It’s actually a good thing I was thrown a ways away.

  Level 2938 unlocked

  5 attribute points available for distribution

  …

  Level 2941 unlocked

  20 attribute points available for distribution

  The altar detonated inside the divine shield, which is exactly what I’d been counting on. The mental damage it did really didn’t even look like physical destruction—material itself crumbled, leaving empty space behind it. It was pretty similar to a nuclear explosion, actually, though the shock wave burned out immediately rather than flattening everything around it. All that was left was sinking soil.

  When the altar and the fifty victims on it exploded, it demolished the fallen god’s body up to the middle of his rib cage. The ribbon around his neck rotted away, the horns disintegrated, and that was the end of a version of Talamei I’d never seen before.

  Next, I have the city of Litirad and a month of fruitless searching. I run around all the human streets twice in search of any mention of my parents, but they’re nowhere to be found.

  One thing I’m happy about is that I don’t come across any dead gods. I don’t have a great relationship with them, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one were to stab me in the back.

  Sagie… I spent the best years of my life going through trials that would leave a normal person an invalid no longer capable of seeing the world in the same bright colors. In fact, I almost went insane after all the times I pushed myself past the edge. LJ, my compensator, saved me time after time, taking me to the quiet area. Sagie, you can be whoever you want—an optimist who everyone loves, a fierce warrior, or a kind mage. Your psyche is so flexible right now that you can pretend to be any of them if that’s what you want. But you’ll never be normal. We’ve done too much to probe the depths of human emotion for that.

  After Litirad, I jump right into the next trial. If my parents aren’t there, they must be somewhere else.

  Current location: House of Contempt.

  The entire location is covered in a dark forest. The tree trunks feature the trapped bodies of people I despise, while creatures that are half plant and half human attack every once in a while. The problem is that I can’t sense them against the overall field of strength. On the other hand, I get through the forest in just three days. Once, right at the end, I have to stop. The baseless loathing for everything around me just about costs me my life, so I create a pool of warm water and cover it with a granite shield after killing the assailant. The pool isn’t a trick for concealing my emotions; it’s more a way to control them.

  I walk using synesthesia for all three days. That saves me from hundreds of attacks that might otherwise have been deadly, as the enemy isn’t always visible in the endless forest. Sometimes, wooden spears fly out of the ground; other times, branches fall down from above me. Still, it’s one of the easier trials.

  After beating an enormous chimeric snake for the finale, I step out into the city of Zhako. None of the human streets in its seventh district offer any sign of my parents, either. When I ask people about them, the answer I always get is that nobody with their names has ever been there.

  Current location: House of Sadness.

  The Swamp of Endless Moonlight greets me like a long-lost son. That is, it does its best to drown me, though I’m able to pull myself out every time. One problem is that my spell for walking on water doesn’t work here. The water is too thick, almost jelly-like, and made out of thousands of dead microorganisms.

  There are only semi-spirit beings in this location. The ghostly trees and spirits of deer are rarest, while the animals have something down inside them that looks like jellyfish. They’re easy to see because of the transparent bodies the deer have. The jellyfish beat like hearts, lending an eerie feel to everything around me. They could be symbiotes that let the spirits interact with the physical world. Regardless, the deer just nibble on the ghostly grass and dash off whenever I get close.

  The darkness in the swamps has a silvery glimmer to it, and I can feel a glowing goo squelching noiselessly underfoot. Not a single aggressive creature comes after me. On the other hand, the sadness is so oppressive that I feel more and more like drowning myself with each step I take. After a week of walking through the swamps, I’ve stopped four times to learn how to remain completely apathetic. There are a few occasions when I come to on the edge of the harmless path, not sure how I got there.

  There are small islands scattered around the swamps. Most of them are traps, however, surrounded by impassable ma
rshes. I see Azami three times. As soon as I catch a glimpse of him, he disappears into a portal, and he looks different all three times—a young fawn, then an adult buck, and finally, an entire herd. I look to see where he came from the last time, and that turns out to be the way out of the trial zone.

  The city of Maadir is more of the same—nobody has seen or heard of my parents. I duck into the shroud to start the next trial.

  Current location: House of Regret

  There’s just water all around, and I’ve already burned through half of my oxygen when I notice that there isn’t any dry land anywhere. I swim up and up until I find a small pocket of air. If anyone asks me what to call this trial, I’m just going to tell them that it’s endless water.

  The water pressure doesn’t do damage, though my oxygen is constantly being depleted. I end up having to relearn how to dolphin-kick. I’m supposed to be swimming upward, but it gets harder and harder—regret and doubt beat down on me. Why am I still swimming? Am I worthy of my parents? I’ve killed so many people. I ruined Kirk’s life. Do I have any right to happiness?

  When I get to the pockets of regret-laced air, I make sensory deprivation chambers and stay there until the regret leaves. It’s here I realize what a terrible gift I’m learning how to use. But if it’s the price of happiness, I’m prepared to pay it.

  There aren’t any enemies—no people, animals, or plants. Really, there’s nothing. For five whole days, all without leaving my capsule, I swim and swim until I get to the border of the city of Izhev.

  Logout

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Claude is still pouring enormous quantities of vitamins into me. It’s his job to keep an eye on the numbers my med capsule is spitting out, adjusting my physical therapy, diet, and workload as needed. Given my tendency toward self-destruction, I’m surprised I’ve lived twenty-one years. It’s Claude who’s been able to help me get through this ordeal without going crazy.