Apocalypse Redux

Chapter 243: Mobius Castle

“You can’t just teleport straight onto campus covered in moon dust, that stuff causes silicosis,” Bailey told Raul as the ranger marched off the teleportation pad.

The issue of creating a proper portal when the distance between endpoints was constantly shifting hadn’t been solved yet, so they’d sidestepped it entirely. Instead, they created a stable portal back on terra firma, in the middle of a huge runic array, and let the moon-side counterpart crash into the person or persons that were being transported. It required plenty of preparation and couldn’t be used often due to a ludicrous mana and material cost, but they couldn’t exactly expect someone to fly back from the literal moon.

“It’s not an issue back on Luna Base,” Raul responded while his magic cleaned up the mess, then his face lit up with sudden realization “No kids or low-Level people around, right. I’ll clean up next time.”

“So, we finally got the last few materials?” Patrick called out from where he’d just portaled in. Unlike Raul, he’d been close enough to return home under his own power.

“Yep,” Isaac said, “Come on, follow me.”

He led them to a small bunker that had sat vacant for months, utterly out of place amidst shiny edifices of steel, glass, and concrete, greenhouses, and artisan shops. It looked like it belonged on Omaha Beach, not a university campus.

But here they were.

A single, massive door that looked like steel but was made of something vastly tougher stood open, letting them enter a room that really did look like the inside of a pillbox, with one significant difference. All the firing ports were aimed inwards, into yet another room that could only be accessed by a second metal door.

And in that room was a Tier 8 circle, piled high with materials that were enough to buy most of the campus.

Mind you, with the sheer amount of wealth poured into this university since the dawn of the [System], both in terms of money and materials retrieved from monsters, their campus was most likely the biggest concentration of value in the world outside of bank vaults or Fort Knox.

[Raid Boss] hearts, most of the elements on the periodic table in significant amounts, countless other monster materials, and more besides.

“How many people are coming here in the hopes they’ll be able to steal this?” Isaac wondered.

“None, I’d wager,” Bailey told him “Pretty sure everyone knows better than to steal from this place after last time. Especially now that everyone is here.”

The first time someone had genuinely tried to rob the university they’d almost killed one of Isaac’s assistants, run into Bailey, and gotten their asses thoroughly kicked. And there hadn’t been a second time.

“Good,” Amy shuddered “I wouldn’t want to get into a fight in the middle of campus, not at the fourth Evolution.”

“Anyway, this is everything, right?” Karl asked as he circled the pile of materials, “Everyone, check out the pile, see if we’re missing anything.”

They all nodded and looked everything up and down.

Messing up here would not be good. Summoning rituals were intentionally designed to be incredibly hard to fuck up, but if you did mess up, it was usually pretty messy, a barely held-together mass of mana and elemental energies tearing through anything and everything in its path until someone killed it or its natural instability tore it apart.

And if that happened here, this would be a Tier 8 monster with half a million points of mana behind it. Very, very bad, any way you sliced it.

But that was why they were being so damn careful.

Once everything had been checked over for the billionth time, everyone else was invited in. Most of them worked somewhere under Bailey in the [System] sciences department, but several had been borrowed from other departments.

The Void Island required half a million points of mana, and only a hundred people could participate. But there’d been more than enough time to make sure they had the mana donators at the ready.

As the others filtered in, Isaac heard several commenting on the odd construction. It would be explained later.

They stayed clear of the inner chamber as the area immediately around the summoning circle would get really wonky in a few minutes, but thankfully, feeding mana into the circle worked through even these walls.

The whole affair was pretty simple, in a way that belied the historical nature of the event. The press hadn’t been allowed inside due to a lack of space, but cameras had been set up to record matters.

***

In a small room, barely three meters across, a magic circle blazed ever brighter, the literal treasure trove of materials piled high atop it taking on a pearlescent sheen until it melted into the runes below.

Space warped above the magic, twisting and folding in ways invisible to the naked eye and utterly incomprehensible to the mind.

Suddenly, there was a howl of wind as air rushed into a room suddenly a hundred times larger than it had been, sucked in by the sudden drop in pressure.

For a long moment, the unnaturally expanded space hung there, the warping now barely perceptible, a strange fuzziness in view caused by the fact that there was an unnatural amount of air between the camera and the far wall.

And then it collapsed back in on itself, the room’s regular dimensions snapping back into place as a shining bright spot above the very center of the circle flashed in existence.

From that spot, a portal unfurled like a flower made from white light, expanding to the size of a garage door.

Void Island had been generated.

Current registered Owner: Adam Bailey

***

The first person to start putting in mana would become the owner and capable of opening and closing the entrance to the island, but Bailey immediately added the rest of the team to the control group as well, granting them the same full, irrevocable, access permissions that he had.

And the instant the spatial storm in the inner chamber had died down, the door was opened and they went inside, right through the shining white doorway.

Officially, this was so they could make sure everything was safe, that they hadn’t accidentally resurrected the [Raid Bosses] whose hearts had gone into this place’s creation or anything equally dangerous. And to be honest, they’d have gotten this directive from the dean’s office if Bailey hadn’t suggested it first.

The real reason was that they wanted to look at the thing they’d created by themselves, without anyone watching them, asking questions, just them enjoying the fruits of their labor.

The other side of the portal was a large, white void, empty, cloud-like, swirls as far as the eye could see. But as far as their distance from the portal was … that was a complete mindfuck. They might be so close that they could reach out and touch them, or they might be impossibly huge and so far away that the distance could be measured in light seconds.

However, there was one thing that was solid, unmoving, and that was the island the portal stood upon. Perfectly circular, two kilometers across, hard-packed dirt and sand. In fact, the whole place was a perfect sphere, half-dirt and half-air.

“Oh, this place is awesome!” Amy and Karl exclaimed almost simultaneously.

“I’m just glad the oxygen automatically replenishes,” Raul commented. That had basically been the first thing he’d asked as he’d have been the one stuck creating the biosphere if the Void Island hadn’t done that on its own.

“This is going to make summoning the higher Tiers so much easier,” Bailey added.

“Yep, you guys can fix this place yourselves if you break it,” Karl clarified. He was usually a good sport about being the only one with the [Skills] to properly fix the summoning rooms in case of substantial damage, but he had to be glad that the dirt could be re-compacted far more easily.

And cleaning out the usual mess of bodily fluids and toxins that accumulated in summoning areas didn’t require a high Level [Engineer] either.

“So, what happens if someone falls off the edge?” Amy asked, cautiously peering over “Are you just plain screwed unless you can fly?”

“Oh, that’s simple, let me show you,” Isaac said and flung a water balloon, which he’d pulled from his spatial storage, off into the nothingness. It vanished and immediately popped out on the opposite side of the “air” half of the island.

But before it could nail Amy in the back of the head, it exploded in a shower of water and latex shreds as she hit it with a magic missile … without turning around.

Then, she flashed Isaac a shit-eating grin.

“The water balloon was a bit of a giveaway, don’t you think? You obviously weren’t going to throw it at anyone else, but you chucked it at the wall … it’s not exactly rocket science.”

“I see the prank war is still alive and well,” Bailey commented, then gave Isaac a mock-rebuking smile “Did you ask us in here without cameras just so you could pull that?”

Isaac shrugged. He hadn’t, of course, but everyone already knew that anyway.

“How long until we have the materials to summon the animal sanctuary version?” Raul asked.

“A few months, but we probably won’t have the spares for years,” Isaac told him “But I’ve been gathering samples of the endangered species we need since the start, we’ll have what we need when we’re ready.”

“Can we summon anything we need in here?” Amy asked.

“[World Bosses] don’t work, the summoning circles explode,” Isaac said “And [Raid Bosses] that can’t fit through the portal will count as trapped and don’t give any loot if attacked from the outside. Putting a couple of guns out there would work, but anything else won’t fly.”

“Perfect,” Amy grinned.

“Oh, that won’t fly. [Raid Bosses] on campus … anyone who so much as mentions that around the dean is going to be out on their ass a few seconds later because he will tear my head off.” Bailey interjected.

“The Void dampens the [Raid Boss] notification, doesn’t it?” Patrick asked rhetorically, then added, “Is there a way to detect these spaces from outside without seeing the portal?”

“Should be possible,” Amy told him, “It’s in a separate dimension, that kind of stable connection should be obvious if we use …”

The conversation had gone well over Isaac’s head about five seconds in. He’d known there was a way to detect these places from afar, but not the exact method, leaving it up to the magic experts to reverse engineer it. As much as he’d like to help, it was well out of his wheelhouse.

“So, anything else you want to do in here before we head back out?” Bailey asked.

There was an almost universal chorus of “no”s. The only one who didn’t immediately answer was Amy. She tried to drench Isaac with a low-power water spell, he dodged, and she clearly decided against trying again.

With that out of the way, they headed back outside, announced that the place was clear, and the dean bustled in with the press.

Fifteen minutes after that, the helpers were let in and the whole thing devolved into a bit of a party.

Initially, everyone was very careful around the edge, but then Isaac demonstrated that the instant you left contact with the floor and went outside the sphere, you’d reappear on the opposite side of the air dome.

In hindsight, that might have been a mistake, as it led to an epidemic of people shoving each other over the edge.

Eventually, he’d have to get one of these places for himself, but that would take a while. No matter his material resources, there were things that couldn’t be bought for love of money.

In time, he’d be able to get the hearts from [Raid Bosses] he killed with the Bundeswehr, or maybe from ones the Guild or even Camelot fought, but they all had their own needs for these materials.

Or maybe he could throw more support behind Fenrir’s attempt at getting the official go-ahead to summon [Raid Bosses] on his own. The group in Antarctica was certainly one of the least constrained organizations in the world, but even so, the treaty of Seoul mandated that wild [Raid Bosses] were to be nuked ASAP, regardless of national borders.

Eh, that was something he had to figure out later, once he’d seen how everything shook out once news of the first Void Island got out. Once he had that information, he could make a better plan.