Chapter 75 Magical Space Battle  

            As the labyrinth flew through space, traveling faster and faster with the help of nuclear fusion bombs, the dungeon carefully watched the area of space where the immortals were vaporized. The dungeon was hopeful that immortals couldn’t survive being turned into plasma, but his hopes were dashed as their bodies were rebuilt in space several seconds after being vaporized. It was odd as there appeared to be a delay for the rebuilding process, but once the rebuilding process started, their bodies were rebuilt in about half a second. If the dungeon could have, he would have whistled. This meant that the immortal core somehow had the ability to turn energy into matter and was also able to work once it was vaporized… or perhaps it rewound time somehow? Whatever the reason the dungeon really didn’t have the tools to investigate.  

            A moment after reforming, the immortals warped space and appeared directly in front of the moving labyrinth. Currently, the labyrinth was protected by electromagnetic shields that the immortals couldn’t get past with folded space, but they could get through the shields with their bodies, thanks to lightning immunity. Furthermore, even though they folded space to get in front of the labyrinth, they were moving very slowly, compared to the labyrinth that was picking up speed at inconsistent intervals. They were like pedestrians trying to get hit by a fast moving car, except in this case, they were immortals that could be completely healed from any injury. That said their attempt to get hit by the accelerating labyrinth was an obvious way to bypass the labyrinth’s shields.

            It was so obvious in fact that the dungeon had built in several hundred coil guns, and as soon as an immortal appeared, in front of the labyrinth, they fired, and for a split second, shields dropped to let the ammunition through. The shields overlapped, so that at least one shield was always on, keeping the immortals from folding space and entering the labyrinth. That would be an instant loss for the dungeon. When the coil guns fired, the shields dropped and reformed in an almost instantanious cascading pattern.

As the ammunition hit, some of the immortals were turned into paste as they were hit by the rounds moving at ten miles a second; others created fields of force and deflected the rounds, but as they deflected, the rounds they were pushed back and out of the path of the labyrinth. In fact, both groups were pushed out of the labyrinth's path. All the dungeon needed the coil gun rounds to do was to keep the immortals from making their way through the labyrinth’s shields, as the dungeon had few options, and all of them desperate, to deal with the immortals if they breached the shields.  

            This little game of keeping the immortals from passing through the shield went on for twenty-eight seconds. As each second passed, the dungeon hoped the immortals would grow bored and leave him alone, but whether they were pursuing the labyrinth because they were determined to finish their mission, or because they realized how much damage the dungeon could do with orbital mechanics, the dungeon didn’t know. It didn’t matter as at twenty-eight seconds, one of the immortals said over radio, “We need to come up with a plan.”

            The dungeon responded with a calm, “No. You may think magic is more powerful than material, and perhaps it is, but the radios you put in your brains are not magical in nature; they are material in nature. I don’t know how big you made your antennas, in your bodies that are bigger on the inside, but something tells me they are not a dozen miles long, and I am a hundred percent sure my fifteen thousand fusion generators will provide far more electricity than your little lightning core can provide. But maybe you can prove me wrong, maybe you can break through my jamming. How about we listen to a song while we see if you can overcome my radio transmissions.”

            And with that, the immortals all began hearing, “Never going to give you up, never going to let you down…”The dungeon had tens of thousands of humans living in its labyrinth at this point, and well, he had recorded his humans singing many, many songs, including some of the most annoying ones from Earth.  

            Moments after the immortals were ricked roled, they changed the radio frequency in their head, as the radio ability would have been almost useless if they couldn’t do that, and the dungeon was very aware that they had access to dozens of frequencies, so on this frequency they heard, “This is the song that never ends…”

            On the next frequency, they heard, “I love you, you love me…”

            Then, “It’s a world of laughter, it’s a world of tears…”

            The immortals began to panic a little as, for the first time in a very long time, they were overpowered. The next song on the list was, “Put down the chainsaw and listen to me…”

            “A duck walked up to the lemonade stand…”

            “When I dance they call me…”

            “Baby shark, doo doo, doo doo…”

            As the immortals attempted to mind talk they kept attempting to enter the labyrinth, despite the annoying music, but their attacks were slower, and much easier to deal with as they lost their confidence for a moment. With that said, their bodies were not handling space all that well, it's just that they had a very high pain tolerance, and their magic continually fixed them. The dungeon also suspected they were using folded space to resupply themselves with oxygen, although the dungeon wasn’t sure.

            The battle went on for some time, although it was an odd battle. In the movies, space battles involved ships on both sides gaining speed and maneuvering around each other, but in this magical space duel, the labyrinth picked up speed every few seconds thanks to the detonation of hydrogen bombs. The immortals, on the other hand, had no way to pick up speed. They could fold space and take a step several thousand miles long, but that step didn’t add much momentum to the immortals. This created a situation where, as the labyrinth picked up speed and the immortals tried to move in front of it, their folded space started crashing into the electromagnetic shields of the labyrinth and breaking. This forced them to send out their folded space further and further in front of the labyrinth as it picked up speed.

            The immortals were finding it difficult to adjust to the ever-changing battle. They have never had prolonged battles where their opponent moved at several miles a second and continued accelerating. Sure, they faced battles where an opponent used magic to move at miles per second for a fraction of a second, particularly when they faced elemental opponents, but those battles took place in relatively small areas, and with the exception of the Labyrinth of Force, there wasn’t another labyrinth capable of stopping folded space. They were facing one of the fastest opponents in their hundreds of thousands of years of experience, with the handicap of their folding space magic being constantly dashed aside. Each immortal swore to themselves that in millennia to come, they would have to invest time in another movement skill so this could not happen a second time.

            Added to that were the problems of the labyrinth’s weapons, both the coil gun and nuclear, the labyrinth’s shields, the annoying music, the inability to talk to each other, and fighting in space in zero gravity and zero pressure. To say that the immortals were out of their comfort zone was a massive understatement. Putting the immortals in this position meant that the dungeon core had to be destroyed.

            As the battle continued, one of the immortals managed to time his folding space just right and stepped through the outermost shield just as the shield reached the area of folding space as soon as he was through the shield, though, he found another shield. The immortal didn’t mind that until the shield he just went through cut off, and a nuclear explosion vaporized his body.

            The nuclear explosion forced the dungeon to spin out of control, and for a moment, the immortals rejoiced as they thought that this meant the labyrinth would slow down, but the dungeon expected this outcome and released half a dozen nukes, and they blew in a very specific pattern, which allowed the labyrinth to stop spinning. As soon as the labyrinth was stabilized, the labyrinth released another nuke out of its back, which began the acceleration process once again, seemingly no worse for wear, although with a slightly different trajectory.

            And so the battle went. The immortals continued trying to get through the shields, and the dungeon used its weapons to make sure it didn’t happen. When the immortals managed to get through the outer shield, the dungoen nuked that area, spun out of control, stabilized, and continued to accelerate.

After nearly half an hour of this, the dungeon sent out a message on all frequencies, “I interrupt the fantastic music from my world for a public service announcement to remind the immortals that my labyrinth included a rather deep basement filled with sage squirrels, void dolphins, and other essence creatures. Those essence creatures are currently outside of my area of influence, and thus no longer under my control. Essence creatures that you immortals didn’t want to reach the Labyrinth of Force, or one of the soul dungeons.”

That caused the immortals to pause for a moment, and one by one they folded space and went back to the foot of the, now, dungeon-less labyrinth. Once they reached it, they cast their oracle spells, and it turned out thousands of essence creatures made their way out of the labyrinth once the dungeon core and the immortals had left.

The immortals wanted to talk mind to mind, but the noise created by the dungeon still drowned out the mind speak, even though it was well over a hundred thousand miles away, and going further by the second. Due to that, the immortals warped space and talked for a few seconds before heading out to wipe out the essence creatures that had escaped from the basement of the labyrinth. Even though they headed in every direction, the immortals all agreed to go after the dungeon and wipe it out once they were done. They could not let such a dangerous dungeon core continue living.

As for the dungeon, he was relieved the immortals had finally left him alone. He had packed thousands of essence creatures down at the very bottom of the labyrinth, expecting them to fight each other once his area of influence left them behind, and of course, as soon as some of the essence creatures began losing fights, they would flee. This gave the immortals enough time to follow him before the essence creatures escaped. It was a bit of a gamble, but it didn’t really cost him anything, as he couldn’t take all the essence creatures with him.

With all that said, the essence creatures gave the dungeon time to experiment. The dungeon never did find exotic matter, but he was able to gather up some of the strange energy used for folding space. NASA said that you should be able to use something like that to rip space apart in front of you, and rebuild it behind you, and so the dungeon gathered several cubic miles of folded space from the bottle the third-tier mage brought, and used it to make a bubble around the dozen-mile-long labyrinth. As the bubble was created, the dungeon found it interesting how well the folded space was affected by electromagnetism, but then again, the dungeon had tools which created magnetism that was several million times the magnetic fields of the moon, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that it affected it.

As soon as the bubble was completed, space in the direction the labyrinth was heading began getting ripped, and that ripping action began pulling the labyrinth toward it, but as space warped around the labyrinth and met once again on the other side and reformed, the energy from that also pushed the labyrinth forward. It was as if the act of ripping space pulled the bubble forward, and the act of stitching it back together pushed it forward, both actions accelerating the labyrinth. Furthermore, the bubble seemed to make the entire labyrinth’s mass reduce to zero, and so the labyrinth began accelerating at tremendous speed, and just ten minutes after the bubble was created, the labyrinth was moving faster than the speed of light and accelerating.

Half an hour later, the immortals had finished clearing up the dungeon’s essence creatures and returned to space to track down the dungeon and wipe it out, but they couldn’t find him. Even with their oracle spells, they could only find the spot where the dungeon wrapped itself in folded space and disappeared. The immortals attempted to do the same thing at that spot, but because they didn’t have forward momentum, space was not ripped apart and stitched back together, and so the immortals missed learning the secret to easy FTL. At least easy FTL for them.


Authors note-We will have an epilogue for both the dungeon and the immortals

Next week chapters might come out a bit late, sorry about that.