Dungeon Wreckers Chapter 1 & 2 (Patreon)

Hello! As promised, here's one of the two pilots for the next (short) series I'm going to write in tandem with Blood & Fur. The other should be published shortly. Cover picture was done by Gharbi Zouhayer and Dinovoila. 

--------

It was September 6th, 2024 in Evermarsh. Time was meaningless, monsters were everywhere, and Belgium had never existed.

A four-story-tall high school stood near the waterfront behind thick brick walls. A third-year student looked through the window on the second floor. He was trying to pay attention to Miss Jansen’s lecture when his Doom Sense spell sensed the incoming disaster. His lone black eye glanced at the cargo ships sailing across the North Sea. An invisible pressure spread through the air from the west, followed by a familiar, thrumming noise.

It was the first week of Matthew Maruki’s school year, and he already knew that it would be interesting.

A streak of violet light swiftly overtook the horizon. The blue sky turned purple beyond the window. No one inside the classroom noticed except for Kari Matsumoto, who occupied the desk right in front of Matthew’s. Unlike him, she pretended not to notice. She would rather bear the inevitable change with stoic dignity rather than stare it down.

Miss Jansen continued her lecture on the French Revolution, unaware of the danger ahead. “The revolutionary ideas from France found fertile ground among the Dutch Republic, leading to internal divisions and eventually, the Batavian Revolution in 1795. The Patriots overthrew the Stadtholderate with French support, establishing–”

The purple wave overwhelmed the sea, the port, and the school, and soon swallowed them all.

—--

“–The Lowland Union by incorporating the Austrian Netherlands and the Duchy of Luxembourg,” Miss Jansen continued. She wore a yellow sweater instead of a white shirt now. “At this point, the Second French Republic has stabilized and seeks to create a buffer state between itself and royalist powers–”

The purple particles disappeared swiftly, alongside the pressure and noise that announced the wave’s arrival. Kari Matsumoto looked over her shoulder and exchanged a knowing glance with Matthew. Both immediately started browsing their history books. The Napoleonic Wars section had been renamed the Republican Wars, the Industrial Revolution had submarines now, and a picture of Josef Stalin in papal garb headlined the final chapter.

At least they had kept the spaceships.

Matthew closed the book with a sigh. A timeshift always means extra homework, and not just the school kind. He raised his hand to get Miss Jansen’s attention. He quickly succeeded, since he was a quiet student. “Yes, Matthew?”

“Is the USA still at war with Canada?” he asked with utmost seriousness.

Miss Jansen looked at him strangely. “No, Matthew, the United States hasn’t been at war with Canada since the eighties. What does it have to do with the Lowland Union’s founding?”

Nothing, but since the timeshift came from the west, Matthew figured that historical detail ought to have changed. Apparently not.

Kari quickly came to his rescue. “I think Matthew is asking whether the Louisiana Purchase and the following Second Anglo-American war partly motivated the French’s decision to bolster the creation of sister republics like the Lowland Union.”

“In a way,” Miss Jansen said. “Both events show a reorientation of France towards Europe at the expense of their former colonial empire, but there is no causality between them–”

As Miss Jansen lost herself to her lecture and quickly forgot the question, Kari peeked over her shoulder and glared at Matthew.

“Don’t bring attention to yourself like that,” she scolded him with a quiet whisper.

“What?” Matthew complained. “We’re at school. I’m here to learn things. It’s not my fault if history changes once a year nowadays.”

His phone vibrated in his pocket. Matthew wasn’t supposed to check it in class, but he had a pretty good idea of who was calling. He’d been killing monsters for four years, after all, so he knew the song by heart. Matthew waited for Miss Jansen to look the other way to read his text messages. As he suspected, John sent him a short text.

Trigger: Butthole, Flyswatter, wanna look for a Dungeon after class? Ten bucks one spawned inside the school.

John was probably right too. A surge of new Dungeons always followed a timeshift, which made them almost tolerable. Few things excited Matthew Maruki more than hunting monsters.

Hunting Dungeons would wait until after he fulfilled his basic human needs. Matthew couldn’t afford to fight monsters at less than his one hundred percent, and two hours of a now outdated history class had made him thirsty for a drink.

“It’s Misfire,” Matthew whispered into Kari’s ear. “He wants to go on a Dungeon hunt."

“Misfire?” Kari visibly sulked. “John called us names again, hasn’t he?”

Matthew shrugged as the bell echoed in the classroom. He was used to John’s behavior by now, but he gave back as much as he took.

The Dungeon Wrecker Association imposed codenames among its members to avoid getting into trouble with unknowing authorities; Matthew was only guilty of trespassing, breaking and entering, and a bit of occasional property damage, but some of his teammates dabbled in weapons smuggling, tech theft, and illegal performance enhancers. Anything that helped monsters sleep in the dirt. All members remembered each other’s nickname, except for John Jäger, who relentlessly mocked them instead.

"He's not wrong, we should patrol the school," Kari said. "Just in case."

"Gonna grab a drink first," Matthew replied as grabbed his schoolbag. "After that, I’m all in."

Kari squinted at him in disapproval. "Lives could be in danger."

"Ours will be if we don't perform at our best," Matthew replied wisely. The last time he entered a Dungeon while sleepy had cost him an eye. "We must prepare ourselves mentally and physically for the difficult task ahead."

"You're finding excuses for your laziness."

Lazy? He was the only one on the team to keep passive spells active at all times!

"I'll fall asleep mid-battle without a shot of sugar." Not to mention that the next class after lunch would be math, which Matthew found almost as soporific as history. "I’ll be quick, don’t worry."

Kari gave up on the argument and the two of them left class together. A flow of students climbed down the school stairs to enjoy a brief moment of freedom outside. Matthew noticed a few new colors among his classmates’ hair and eyes. Green, blue, red… mankind grew more colorful with each timeshift. All of Europe would transform into an anime convention at this rate.

Kari exchanged a few greetings, and politely declined a daring boy’s attempt to invite her out for lunch. Matt couldn’t blame him for trying. Kari “Crit” Matsumoto was cute and popular, enough to be named class representative. She wore her shoulder-length raven hair in a ponytail and her fair skin only accentuated her gray eyes’ piercing stare. As the tennis club’s star, she was very much in shape under her white sweatshirt and jogging pants; she also regularly topped grade ranks, even without the use of spells. In short, Kari Matsumoto was a winner. Many wonder why she hung out with Matt and John.

Meanwhile, Matt drew the wrong kind of attention, as he always did. Matt was a bit thin and pale for his age, but not gaunt either. He kept his black hair short and liked to stick to yellow shirts and beige pants, with the occasional cap. Some girls used to call him cute once.

And he still was… if one ignored the white surgical eyepatch covering his left eye.

It was quite off-putting to most, though less so than what the all-consuming black hole secretly hidden underneath. Humans liked normalcy. When they looked at Matt’s face and saw a single blue eye staring back at them, it reminded them of their own fragility. And they didn’t like it. At all. Most students never said it, of course, not to Matt’s face, but they stayed clear of him nonetheless.

If only they knew he had lost it fighting a monster. At least Matthew could have boasted about his ‘war scars.’

“I’ve found a nifty change,” Matthew informed Kari after he finished checking the daily news on his cellphone. “Universal Pictures launched a vampire cinematic universe.”

“Vampires?” Kari’s head perked up in interest. “How do they look?”

Matthew pulled up a picture of a monstrous, batlike humanoid with a lamprey mouth full of fangs.

“They’re not the hot kind,” Matthew said. “It’s a horror-comedy franchise.”

“Oh.” Kari pouted in disappointment. “Now I’m sad.”

“I can try to grow fangs if you want,” Matthew suggested. “I already do my best to avoid sunlight, so I’m basically halfway there. I just need a quick green spell.”

“You’re adorable, Matthew, but you should go outside more often,” Kari replied with a giggle. “Besides, I'm only a few months away from donating my blood anyway.”

Most students had left for the cafeteria—Friday was burger and fries—so the path to the vending machines was clear. Nobody would watch. Nobody without powers.

“Can you watch my back for a sec?” Matthew asked his teammate.

Kari gave him a disapproving look. “You’re using your Wormhole Key to steal again?”

“I’m short on funds,” Matthew reminded her. His parents couldn’t afford to give him much pocket change after covering his tuition. “What’s wrong with getting freebies now and then? Being a Dungeon Wrecker doesn’t pay much.”

“That’s true, but…” Kari crossed her arms and looked away. “Never mind.”

With a lookout ensuring no one would interrupt him, Matthew pressed his palm against the vending machine’s glass. A yellow glow immediately surged from his skin.

It had been four years since Matthew gained those fabulous cosmic powers. Four years spent struggling against the weight of Disbelief. Doc O'Connor coined the term after studying it in-depth: the more normal people observed a supernatural phenomenon, the faster it turned into a natural phenomenon. The Doc believed it was reality's attempt to suppress all Dungeon-related activities.

For someone like Matthew, it meant struggling to manifest spells when observed by others. A crowd outright negated his powers. Even when he managed to use them, their minds found perfectly natural rationalizations. He could quote them by heart: that hole was caused by a leak, the crater was always there, the manufacturer ripped us off… They wouldn’t even believe in the existence of Dungeons. Their victims simply joined the missing persons list.

Without non-Crawler witnesses, his Key ability manifested without fail. A perfectly circular hole opened on the glass display. Matthew swiftly grabbed a soda can from the rail conveyor, then watched with satisfaction as the hole closed on its own. He had committed the perfect crime.

The Dungeon Wrecker Association didn’t call him Wormhole for nothing.

“At least you’re not stealing the money,” Kari commented, a hint of displeasure in her voice.

Matthew observed the coin dispenser with a fresh new look.

“Don’t even think of it,” Kari warned him.

“I’m willing to share,” he replied.

“The profits go to the student council treasury, which I preside over. Please don’t try to bribe me on my first week.”

What was the point of volunteering for an elected office if you couldn’t skim money now and then? Matthew knew his teammate enough not to push the issue and opened his can the old-fashioned way. The delicious liquid sugar flowed down his gullet and into his veins.

“I’ve found the timeshift’s source,” Kari said as she checked her cellphone. “A wave of super earthquakes struck Central America in the nineties.”

Matthew peeked at her phone and winced upon reading the Wikipedia page. A series of 9.6 magnitude quakes spread from Panama all the way to Mexico from 1999 to 2001, devastating cities, splitting mountains, and fracturing the land. Millions perished during that time, triggering waves of refugees and disrupting the global supply chains.

“Panama, huh?” Matthew muttered to himself. He recalled someone on their forums mentioning a stage-four Dungeon in the region. “That’s sad.”

“It is,” Kari replied grimly. “Those poor people…”

Dungeons mostly fed in secrecy. Like predators requiring meat to grow stronger, each new victim fueled their growth. If allowed to reach critical size, they reached maturity and triggered a timeshift. History changed to accommodate a new and terrible disaster that wiped out countless lives past, present, and future.

Dungeons were like weeds; best nipped in the bud.

“Anyway, I’m good to go now,” Matthew declared after stretching a little. His lost strength returned to him. “I’m tanned, I’m rested, I’m pumped. Let’s go Dungeon hunting.”

A text message notification suddenly popped up on Kari’s phone. She frowned and swiftly showed Matthew its content.

Trigger: Bring your asses (and my money) to the gymnasium ASAP. I’ve found one.

----- 

Part 2

The gymnasium stood a stone’s throw away from the main building’s southern wing, right next to the sports fields. Matt and Kari quickly found John waiting for them near the entrance, lying back under the shadow of a tree.

“You two took your sweet time,” John complained. With his shaggy blonde hair, sharp blue eyes, and handsome features, he reminded Matt of a teenage Ben Foster minus the beard. He was the only student to wear a coat in September—mostly so he could hide guns—and gloves—so as not to leave any fingerprints. “I was about to smash my way in.”

“Climb down from your horse, John,” Kari replied in annoyance. “Flyswatter? Really? That’s the best name you could come up with?”

“Got you here quickly, didn’t it?” John jerked a thumb at the gymnasium. “Can you feel it?”

Matthew had more experience than his teammates with Dungeons, so he immediately picked up on the weird feeling coming off from the building. A subtle sensation of wrongness.

“Flux Sight,” he said. Flux poured into his eye and let them detect the invisible: a pallid cloud of green dust stained with blue blotches coming from the gymnasium. Hardly noticeable. “It’s a Stage One Dungeon, I think. Dual color, green-blue. Nothing to write home about.”

Stage One Dungeons—the Association officially called them ‘Cells’—were difficult to detect due to their small size, but easy to destroy. They followed the law of the triple ones: one floor, one door, one core. Its monsters were few in number and usually weak.

If left unattended, they would then go through stages two, three, and four, before finally triggering a timeshift.

“You both owe me ten bucks each,” John declared. He never forgot such details. “Show me the money.”

“I never officially accepted the challenge,” Matthew pointed out.

John snorted. “Chicken.”

“Duckling,” Matthew replied. He couldn’t explain why, but it seemed appropriate.

Kari ignored them both as she checked her phone. “According to the school schedule, we’ve got an hour before class 3-C comes in for P.E. time after lunch.”

“One hour?” Matthew shrugged. “I say we can clear it in five minutes.”

“The second-years just finished their own class,” John said. “I don’t think anyone is missing yet.”

“Good,” Matthew commented. New Dungeons were like newborn babes: grasping, hungry, and insatiable. They picked up every human within range of their entrance with no subtlety whatsoever. “Let’s clean it up.”

Few things got his blood pumping more than the hunt.

The trio entered the gym by the backdoor. As a recently renovated school with a high reputation, the Lycée Français d’Evermarsh was loaded to bear with cameras, metal detectors, and RFID badges. These measures might keep human predators at bay, but the real monsters always found ways to slip through the cracks—and John was living proof you can still smuggle weapons in with the right know-how. Thankfully, Kari’s student council membership granted her access to most areas.

Inside the quiet gymnasium, light filtered through the tall windows on the polished wood of the basketball court. A volleyball net stood in its midst and a bouldering wall on its tail end. Matthew followed the aura trail to the entrance most forbidden of all rooms.

The girls' locker room.

Kari sighed in despair. “Don’t tell me the Dungeon is in there.”

“Can I go in first?” Matthew asked immediately.

“No,” Kari replied swiftly. “Now shush. I hear someone.”

As predicted, a second-year student walked out of the locker room; a pretty blonde with whom Matthew crossed paths with a few times at the dorm. Chloé, he thought her name was.

“Kari? Matthew?” she asked, slightly surprised to find a group of third-years in the gymnasium. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, Chloé, good to see you,” Kari replied with a smile. Kari Matsumoto knew everybody. “Don’t mind us, we’re just checking the sports equipment ahead of class.”

“Always the worrywart, huh?” Chloé said with a chuckle. “Actually, have you seen Marion on your way in?”

“Marion?” Kari’s brows furrowed slightly. “No, we haven’t. Is something wrong?”

“That’s odd.” Chloé scratched her cheek. “She was right behind me when I left the shower, but now I can’t find her anywhere. Maybe she went to lunch early.”

John and Matthew exchanged a brief glance. The former immediately took a step toward the locker room’s entrance, much to Chloé’s outrage. “Hey!” she complained. “What are you doing, you peep–”

On paper, John Jäger had it all. He was smart, handsome, athletic, and the national champion of the popular Board & Conquest game. By all metrics, he should be the school’s most popular student… were it not for a small detail.

“Peep?” John sneered at Chloé. “To peep, I would have to find any of you attractive.”

John Jäger was an asshole.

“W-what did you say?!” Chloé complained, only for John to utterly deny her existence and invade the girls’ locker room anyway. “Hey you bastard, don't ignore me!”

“It’s a drug bust!” Kari lied through her teeth, and so poorly it hurt to watch. “Someone smuggled cocaine and we’re here to confiscate it!”

“If you keep silent, you’ll get some,” Matthew joked. That ought to pacify her.

“Matthew, you’re not helping!” Kari chided him before quickly grabbing the furious Chloé and leading her away. “Let me explain…”

Trusting Kari to lie her way out of this mess, Matthew quickly followed John and found himself disappointed. All the boys in his class fantasized about the girls’ locker room, but it turned out to be the same deodorant-smelling coffin of concrete as the boys’ room. Rows of lockers adorned with stickers and magnets surrounded sweat-drenched benches like silent sentinels. A little steam wafted from the showers. The air was still warm and filled with a Dungeon’s unbearable stench.

“We’ve found the entrance,” John said as he studied the room. “Can you blow the doors open?”

“Sure I can,” Matthew replied, slightly insulted by the question. “You know I can create black holes, right?”

“Yes I do, you keep mentioning it whenever we hunt together.”

“I can solo the Dungeon too, if you do my homework.” Matthew showed great diligence when it came to killing monsters, and little to none when it came to student responsibilities. “I don’t want to drag you screaming and whining to the Doc again.”

“In your dreams, Maruki.” John’s grin had all the bloodthirst of a wild predator. “I live for this.”

Matthew raised his left hand at the aura cloud filling the shower room. All Crawlers could infiltrate Dungeons on their own, but those without a deft touch triggered an alarm response. A subtler entrance would help rescue the victim.

He grabbed onto the floating energy, sensing the conflicted resistance of the Dungeon. It wanted to pull Matthew inside its innards—human lives fueled its growth after all—and yet instinctively understood the danger. Someone who wished to enter a Dungeon could not be prey.

Not that it could keep Matthew out. Whether subtle or loud, he always found his way in.

Kari rejoined them a few seconds later, alone and flustered. “I convinced her to vacate the premises,” she said while glaring at John. “You’re a brute.”

“We don’t have time to waste with chit chat. Not with someone’s life on the line.” John might have been a boor, but one who lived up to his responsibilities. “Ready when you are, Maruki.”

“Buckle up,” Matthew replied.

He suddenly pulled back his hand and tore the fabric of space in two.

A surge of blue and green light swallowed the group whole. The shower room changed around them in subtle and obvious ways. The musky air grew cold, an otherworldly chill seeping into Matthew’s very bones. Dust motes danced under showers dripping black oil instead of water; the sink mirrors cracked into distorted shapes.

The shift ended in seconds. John immediately drew an Uzi from under his jacket whereas Kari’s skin started glowing with a blue hue. “Intuimotion,” she cast on herself. “Premium Thoughts.”

Matthew walked out of the showers first. He didn’t need any weapon and he already kept passive spells active at all times. His Doom Sense perked up immediately, warning him of the danger ahead.

The rest of the room had changed greatly. Dungeons were a mirror of normal reality, the funhouse kind. The lockers stood ajar, empty, and dust-laden. The benches were festooned with delicate traces of webs.

The source of the latter crawled on a wall, its eight legs climbing on the vertical surface as if it were a floor. The creature vaguely resembled a spider, with its body of coarse black hair and its sharp mandibles, but spiders rarely grew as large as a pony. The monster hadn’t noticed Matthew yet.

Hence he politely announced his presence.

“Hey,” Matthew said glibly.

The creature looked up at him with its hundreds of hate-filled eyes. Matthew quickly patted it on the head before it could attack. The monster’s hair was strangely soft and pleasing to the touch. A shame.

“Die for me,” Matthew whispered.

His magic surged from his palm and split the spider’s head open. A perfectly circular hole the size of a fist opened in the middle of its skull, tearing through the brain, the flesh, and the eyes too. The beast’s mandibles gnarled garbled noise as the body collapsed to the floor. The spider twitched a few more seconds before granting Matthew’s wish.

“First blood is mine,” Matthew boasted to his teammates. “Gonna get more.”

The hunt had begun.

------

Next Chapter

-------

A/N: that one is the more lighthearted/comedic of the two, albeit with some serious undertones; think more like Perfect Run in term of tone. The color system is the same as in this novel, as they take place in the same multiverse. 

I'm going to post the poll for the choice with more information on each novel tomorrow for you to decide which one you prefer ;) until then, happy reading.