Dungeon Wreckers Chapter 3: It's Always Loud (Patreon)

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“Subtle or loud?” John as he charged his weapon.

A dungeon always began with answering this question. Doc O’Connor likened Dungeons to bodies and monsters to their immune system. Since manifesting traps and monsters consumed energy, most Dungeons only summoned these defenses to pick off the helpless humans they caught in their web. Crawlers who didn’t raise too much of a ruckus could slip under the radar while taking out the occasional critter. 

However, if the Dungeons started registering intruders as a threat—usually when they started making a mess or reaching for the core—then the place fully mobilized. They summoned waves of monsters, raised barriers to hamper progression, and generated hazards… in short, they ratcheted the difficulty up a notch.

Going loud had its advantages. A Dungeon wasting its resources on intercepting an intruder would eventually run out of power to defend its core, and forcing its defenders to focus on the threats could offer a precious reprieve to harmless victims caught inside. 

“Loud,” Matthias answered immediately. “I blow a path to the core, in and out, five minutes tops.”

“I vote for a subtle approach,” Kari replied. “The dungeon is too young to tell us Crawlers apart from normal humans. It might mistake Marion for one of us and target her aggressively.”

“Sorry Maruki, I’m with Matsumoto on that one,” John said, much to Matthew’s disappointment. “At least until we recover the girl, that is. We can treat ourselves with a little slaughter afterward.”

Matthew rolled his only eye. Going loud meant he could use his Wormhole to dig holes in the dungeon and make a beeline straight to the core. Their lost classmate—nay, the entire school—would be safer as soon as the Dungeon was gone. 

Alas, democracy failed him again. 

While Kari and John went up ahead to scout, Matthew traced a circle on the wall closest to the dungeon’s exit. His Key granted him control over the concept of hole. Buttholes, bullet holes, memory holes, wormholes, black holes, white holes… Matthew could create all of them at will.

However, Yellow Keys and spells followed their own logic. Semantic, conceptual logic. A hole inside something didn’t behave like a hole that led somewhere. To create portal holes, he needed to mark a surface and then a second to open a pathway. This one would let the team quickly evacuate Marion once they found her, or retreat if they faced an unexpected problem.

Matthew quickly caught up to his team once he was finished. As it turned out, their reward for exiting the girls’ locker room proved to be… well, more lockers. A crossroad of dull gray narrow corridors stretched before the trio, with rows after rows of rusty lockers neatly standing along the walls. These differed only by the number of cobwebs sticking onto their surface, or the dented scars on their doors. The whole place smelled of oil and stagnant water. 

Matthew had expected more originality. Then again, newborn Dungeons lacked imagination. 

“Seems the place is bigger than I thought,” John commented. “I regret not bringing a bomb to school today. It would have come in handy.”

Kari squinted at him. “Today?”

“You’d be surprised how much stuff I can smuggle through the metal detectors,” John replied with a small shrug. He opened his jacket, unveiling a small armory of blades and small handguns. “Want a weapon, Matsumoto?”

John never offered Matthew weapons. He didn’t need them. 

“I would like a knife, if you have any,” Kari replied. John quickly tossed her a switchblade, which she swiftly caught in midair. “Thank you. I noticed foot-dirt residue on the left side of the hallway, so I think Marion went that way.”

Matthew looked at the floor but didn’t see anything. He knew better than to doubt his teammate, however. Not since he saw her snipe a fly with a needle from fifty meters away. Her Key granted her some mad levels of visual perception and accuracy. 

“She can’t have wandered far,” John said as he fearlessly continued down the hallway. Matthew and Kari quickly followed after him, with the former paying more attention to the rows of lockers surrounding them. A few looked slightly ajar, their doors rattling softly. Matthew half-expected a monster to burst out of them anytime, but his Doom Sense had yet to tingle.

It didn’t take him long to notice a peculiar oddity: a golden locker standing out from the rest of its trusty neighbors, its pristine door untouched by cobwebs. The word ‘treasure’ was carved on its frame in plain old English. 

“Marion isn’t inside it,” Kari said almost immediately. 

“I didn’t say anything,” Matthew complained. 

“You were thinking it–”

A scream echoed further away before Kari could finish. The trio immediately rushed at its source without hesitation, taking a corner at the next crossroad and then another. Matthew’s Doom Sense stirred in the back of his head. 

They found the victim cowering from a giant spider in a dead-end locker alley. The grotesque monster had a huge moist brain for an abdomen, but from the way its mandible gnarled at the skinny girl half its size, it didn’t see much use for it.

Kari reacted first and dashed ahead in a blitz of speed. John and Matthew both raised guns behind her; the latter’s weapon had a thumb for a hammer and a finger for a barrel, but it was quick to fire.

“Bang,” Matthew whispered as John pressed his Uzi’s trigger. 

A new butthole opened right in the spider’s back-brain, though no projectile ever hit it. It simply ripened as Matthew’s power created a bullet hole from nothing. John’s bullets deviated in midair and shot the joints at the monster’s legs, causing it to collapse to the ground with a screech. Kari jumped on its back in a blink of Matthew’s eye, stabbed it, and then gutted the creature from one head to the other. Blue cerebrospinal fluid—Matthew was proud to remember the term from the biology class—spilled all over her shoes. The monster thrashed around madly for a few seconds before breathing its last. 

“Kari, which of us shot the spider first?” Matthew asked after lowering his finger gun. 

“John,” she replied as she stepped down from the monster’s carcass. Matthew crossed his arms in disappointment while John gave him the smuggest smirk imaginable. “Marion, are you hurt?”

The girl—a skinny brunette with freckles and shaggy clothes—reacted just how Matthew expected her to: by screaming, crying, and cowering in a corner while begging for her life. 

“Easy, it’s over,” Kari did her best to console her, gently patting Marion’s back with one hand and holding her bloody knife in the other. “You are safe now.” 

“Until the spider’s friends come to avenge its death and eat us all,” Matthew replied, which earned him a glare from his teammate. “I’m just saying we should aim for the core now.”

Kari let out a sigh. “Just open the path to the exit.”

Matthew quickly traced a wide circle on the ground with his finger. Yellow light swiftly bent space inside its confines. Matthew sensed the metaphysical weight of the Dungeon crashing down on his spell, its vain attempt to close an ulcer developing in the very heart of its bowels. An older, late-stage Dungeon with Flux to spare might have succeeded, but this one was young and weak. Matthew hardly needed to focus to open a portal back to the exit. 

Kari took the shell-shocked Marion in her arms and gently guided her to the hole of yellow light. “I’ll take her outside and come back,” she informed her teammates. “Wait for me to strike the core, alright? Don’t take any risk.”

“Ugh, fine,” Matthew replied without enthusiasm. He watched as Kari led Marion into the portal, both of them vanishing in a surge of light, and then turned to look at John. The same idea had crossed both of their minds. “Wanna rob the place before she returns?”

“With haste,” John replied. He never turned down an opportunity for profit. 

The two of them left the portal behind and went back the way they came in search of the treasure locker. Matthew’s Doom Sense triggered as they took a corner, which caused him to look at its source: a rusty, perfectly normal locker in the midst of a row full of them. 

John looked over his shoulder. “What is it?”

“Gimme a sec.” Matthew punched the locker. A gaping, bloody hole ripened on its surface right as the door grew a set of teeth. The false locker let out a gargle of agony, spit its guts all over the floor, and then fell inert. “Locker mimic.”

Dungeons were living entities in a way; and like all lifeforms, they were subject to the rules of natural selection. They constantly developed new mutations and adaptations to better protect themselves from Crawlers or to catch more victims. Some said the first Dungeons didn’t have monsters or traps at all. They simply trapped their victims until they died of hunger or thirst. Only when Crawlers appeared did they develop better defenses. 

Once upon a time, Dungeons realized that most human prey struggled to resist the appeal of a shiny treasure. Even Crawlers wasted time when presented with a good enough catch. Thus Dungeons began to place precious objects as lures to catch more victims. It worked well for Crawlers at first…

Until they discovered the concept of mimics. 

Two years back, you couldn’t open a drawer without a monster jumping out of it. This predictably caused a dramatic loss of interest in treasures by the human population, which defeated the point of a lure. Dungeons thus settled on a comfortable percentage of five percent mimic and ninety-five percent treasures. Small enough to keep humans invested in treasure hunts, high enough to catch them unaware now and then. 

Exit doors were always traps though. Normal people couldn’t escape a Dungeon without the use of a Key.

With the mimic quickly dealt with, the duo quickly made their way back to the treasure locker. Matthew swiftly opened after confirming his Doom Sense didn’t trigger. He prayed for a bounty of gold, maybe a diamond or two. 

Instead, he found an aluminum sports trophy and a set of women’s swimsuits. Matthew looked at them in pure disappointment. 

“Did you forget treasures match the Dungeons’ aesthetics?” John taunted him. “You thought a gymnasium would drop diamonds?"

“I’ll take the trophy,” Matthew grumbled. Who knew, their fence might get a few hundred bucks from it. “You can keep the swimsuits.”

“Trick’s on you, I can sell that shit for twenty euros a piece.” John opened Matthew’s bag and quickly crammed it to the brim with their finds. “You’re really that poor, Maruki?”

“I do what I must to survive,” Matthew countered with the utmost seriousness. Third-world paupers would take pity on his monthly scholarship. “My art supply budget is on life support right now.” 

“Just get a part-time job or something,” John replied after closing the bag. Kari quickly caught up to them soon after, a disapproving frown on her face. “Any issues with the girl, Matsumoto?”

“I took Marion outside, but I don’t think she has a Key,” Kari said. “We should aim for the core before the next sports class begins.”

Matthew thought she would never ask. Shame for the lack of a Key though. The Association needed some fresh blood. 

The locker rows rattled and shuddered, which Matthew took as a sign of the Dungeon’s displeasure at being denied a meal. A dozen giant spiders quickly stepped out from a corner and into the hallway, crawling on the ceiling and the walls straight at the trio. They gnarled and screeched and hissed, their squirmy legs clanging against the lockers. 

“Oh look, they think they have a chance,” John said, a vicious smirk stretching on his lips. He raised his Uzi for the kill. “How cute!”

“Whoever kills the least of them pays for dinner,” Matthew immediately proposed. 

For once, Kari smiled at the prospect. She stretched her legs with some footwork, her bloody knife shining under the dim lights of the ceiling’s lamps. “Challenge accepted.”

The hallway erupted into a shower of blood and lead. 

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Next Chapter

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A/N: as promised, here's the next Dungeon Wreckers chapter (Pilot was split between chapter 1 and 2); another will be published tomorrow on Friday.

I'll probably follow the same update scheme as Gunsoul; the first five chapters will be available to all patrons, after which I'll build up the backlog for higher tiers (Commerce Heroes will have access to it as well since these stories replace Commerce Emperor for a while).

In any case, hope you'll enjoy this comedy ;) it's a bit heavier on the jokes than Gunsoul.