Dungeon Wreckers Chapter 4: Tutorial's End (Patreon)

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They paved the hallway with spider bile and viscera. 

Being short of an eye never hindered Matthew’s aim. Though his gunslinging hardly compared with John’s, he more than pulled his weight. Eyes, limbs, abdomen, they all bled the same. 

“Bang,” Matthew said as he blew out a spider’s head, then a second. “Bang bang bang!” 

By now the Dungeon had grasped the danger the trio represented and fully mobilized against them. Another wave of monsters sneaked up on the group from the other end of the hallway, trapping them between two tides of screeching critters. John took care of one side, while Matthew and Kari slaughtered their way through the other. 

His Doom Sense warned Matthew of danger to his left. The nearest locker’s door snapped open and a monstrous pair of mandibles emerged from the shadows within a second later. Matthew simply slapped them back, his power blasting a door-sized hole in his would-be assassin’s head. 

Matthew could kill almost anything with a touch, but he was neither agile nor durable. Doom Sense only forewarned him of incoming danger; if the attack moved faster than his body could react, then his spell wouldn’t help him evade it. 

Hence Matthew mostly left the frontlines to Kari. She didn’t possess Flux reserves large enough to keep her passive spells active at all times. In the brief moments when she managed to stack them though, she became a killing machine.

Watching her dance among the monsters was quite the mesmerizing spectacle. Bullets harmlessly flew past her. Hungry fangs closed in on empty air. Her knife flashed faster than Matthew’s eye could follow, skewering one spider after another. Not a drop of monster blood managed to stain her clothes. She always managed to step out of the way. 

Meanwhile, John cried his joy for all to hear. Now that they had rescued the victim, he could afford to enjoy himself.

“Man, I've missed this!” he shouted in between fits of laughter. His bullets surged with red energy when they emerged from his gun’s barrel. These crimson comets carved a bloody path through the arachnids, before bending corners and nailing more of their comrades. “Just letting go and blowing skulls up!”

Many of his projectiles moved around limbs to target the vitals, leaving scores of headless arachnids bleeding to death on the floor. John’s Key allowed him to control the motion of his bullets, so Matthew knew this was intentional. His comrade never settled for the artful and poetic death when he could settle for the quick and dirty. Quantity over quality.

John Jäger was a practical person. 

To his credit, his method let him rack up a bigger killcount than his comrades. It didn’t please Matthew. He would lose the bet if he kept lagging behind. For the sake of his bank account, he would have to step up his game. 

Matthew briefly interrupted his killing spree to check the flow of blue and green particles floating in the air. Most slightly bent to his left, like metal pieces thrown off-course by the presence of a powerful magnet.

He knew where to go.

“Kari, can you keep them occupied for a minute or two?” Matthew asked as he ran his hand along the lockets to his left. “I’ll be right back.”

“Sure!” Kari replied absentmindedly, her knife firmly stuck between a giant spider’s head and the rest of its body. Only when she guessed her teammate’s plan did her head snap in his direction. “Wait, Matthew, wait!” 

Her warning came too late. The hallway trembled as Matthew’s power opened a hole through the wall in a bright flash of yellow light. 

The Dungeon cloaked itself in the trappings of a locker room, but its true nature swiftly revealed itself. Matthew’s power tore open concrete skin to unveil ectoplasmic flesh of writhing white tendrils. These coiling cables scrabbled and wriggled upon being exposed to the outside world, blue and green light coursing through their snakelike-length as they attempted to close the rift. 

A useless effort. The Dungeon had spent most of its Flux manifesting monsters, so it lacked the power to heal its wound. Matthew kept pressing against the receding flesh, his power digging an ever-expanding tunnel into the Dungeon’s bowels. The concentration of particles increased the deeper he went in. The noise of Kari’s angry reproaches and John’s gunfire slowly grew distant. 

Matthew’s passage finally reached its other end after a good ten meters of constant progress. The Dungeon’s deepest sanctum stretched before him, its shape reminiscent of a twisted basketball court. 

Dungeons rarely managed to perfectly mimic a real place, and this one was no exception: the lines that marked the field’s boundaries shone with blue Flux, the bleachers’ benches were cracked or overturned, and the scoreboard hung upside-down. Warped spider web banners hung above a dusty wooden floorboard. 

Matthew quickly scanned the hall until he found the true prize: the Dungeon’s core, enshrined on a spiderweb hoop, right atop a rusty backboard. 

A Dungeon’s core was its nucleus, its heart, a monster seed, and a Flux engine packed in one nasty package. This one was a pretty green orb covered in a scintillating pale blue web pattern. An outsider could have mistaken it for a soccer ball, and indeed, it looked no larger than one. 

Matthew knew better. All Flux inside the pocket dimension converged on that orb. A shroud of blue and green particles floated over its surface, forming spasming clouds of light and ethereal rings of energy. Matt already salivated at the thought of smashing it on the ground and cracking it open. 

But like all good treasures, the core had its defender.

All Dungeons had a trump card, an ultimate weapon or last line of defense, and this one was no exception. An arachnid behemoth fell from the ceiling and landed on the floorboard in a devastating crash, cracking wood and blowing dust in all directions. The previous spiders were as big as ponies, but this one’s size rivaled that of an elephant. Taut, articulated metal limbs carried an abdomen armored in a mesh of knotted football pads. A gaping maw of fangs opened in the middle of a ring of cybernetic eyes glowing with malice as the monster stepped firmly between Matthew and the core.  

Matthew was far from afraid. In fact, he overflowed with giddiness. 

“Neat,” he said, his hand moving to his face, “That’s the perfect angle!” 

Matthew swiftly removed his eyepatch and unveiled the black hole underneath.  

A hungry void awakened inside his eye socket with a deep, haunting growl. The stagnant air suddenly swirled into a whirlpool of darkness as light and dust alike were sucked into a pit of nothingness. The Flux particles floating around the Core escaped its gravity. A stronger pull called them back to a challenger. The web banners snapped, the cracked stands crawled onto the ground, and the mighty spider stumbled. 

It took all of Matthew’s strength to stand in place. Although he was immune to his own power, he couldn’t say the same for the floor beneath his feet. The wood cracked under him and splinters from the cracked stands bounced off his skin. Since his Doom Sense didn’t activate, he held his ground and continued to apply pressure. 

When Matthew first lost his eye, his Key ability had undergone a strange mutation. His power automatically took over the hole in his skull’s socket and turned it into a bottomless, ever-hungry cosmic abyss. Energy, matter, light, dust, trash, piles of unfinished tests… black holes weren’t picky eaters, and Matthew’s own consumed everything thrown its way. 

However, keeping that hole open burned through Matthew’s Flux reserves at high speed and it risked absorbing friends and foes alike, not to mention objects pulled towards him might end up hitting him instead of the hole. Hence why he rarely used it. 

Matthew would make an exception today. A direct shot at the Boss and the Core was too good of an opportunity to pass. 

His two targets proved unable to resist the pressure. The Boss failed to crawl away, its mighty limbs dragged closer to death. The Core’s backboard throne snapped like a twig behind it. The monstrous spider stretched into a mass of flesh and particles as the black hole consumed it. The cracking Core managed to keep its spherical shape until the final stretch, but the darkness swallowed it all the same. 

The Dungeon shook, then screamed. 

Matthew barely had time to close his black hole and cover it back with his eyepatch before a tremor threw him off his feet. The walls trembled and wriggled around him, tendrils of white flesh unbinding into oblivion. With its heart gone, the Dungeon pumped a wild stream of green and blue Flux particles through its halls and corridors. Matthew shielded his ears from the cacophony of screeching wails and crumbling walls. 

Being expelled from a dying Dungeon was akin to receiving a zero on a test: rarely lethal, but always unpleasant. The entire pocket dimension collapsed in a sea of particles that hit Matthew like a cold shower. The blowback threw his body across a thin, invisible barrier—the layer separating the Dungeon from the rest of the universe—with a final whimper.

The lights of the girls' shower flickered as Matthew, Kari, and John landed on its slippery floor on top of one another; with John at the bottom, Kari in the middle, and Matthew at the top. The Flux aura that led them to the entrance vanished in a final whimper. 

No traces of the Dungeon remained in the real world. That door was forever shut. 

“I win,” Matthew declared with a smug smirk. His joy lasted until Kari hastily pushed him off her back. “Hey!”

“Maruki, you dirty kill thief!” John raged at his teammate as the trio rose back to their feet. “I was on a roll! How dare you ruin my fun?”

“You were running out of bullets, John,” Kari scolded him before sweeping dust off her pants. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m good,” Matt replied, though it was a lie. Unveiling his eye-hole had left him more winded than a marathon. He would take a nap in math class to recover his lost strength. 

“And be thankful for that.” Kari’s brows arched in a black glare of worry and quiet anger. “Matt, how many times will I have to tell you? Don’t run off to fight on your own.”

“Don’t care, I won the bet,” Matthew replied mischievously. Kari crossed her arms at him, but dropped the matter when they heard cries coming from outside the shower. She immediately stepped in the noise’s direction when Matthew grabbed her sleeve. “Kari, the knife.”

“Oh, right.” Kari suddenly remembered the weapon in her hands. The alien blood on it had turned red. The universe probably rationalized it into being ketchup, or maybe genuine human blood. Matthew was curious, but not enough to check. “Ugh… what to do…”

John swept the bloody knife off her hands. “I’ll clean up,” he said while hiding his guns back under his coat. “The two of you should check on the victim. She must be throwing up by now.”

John’s prophecy proved accurate enough. Matthew and Kari found Chloé and Marion in the nearby washroom, the former tending to the latter as she vomited into the toilet. Matthew had to pinch his nose not to imitate her. A girl’s shit smelled no sweeter than a boy’s one.  

“Kari, how good to see you!” Chloé said, her eyes wide with worry for her friend. “Marion is sick!”

“There was… there was a spider in the shower…” Marion managed to wheeze out in between gasping breaths. “So big…”

Matthew arched an eyebrow. “How big?”

Marion fearfully joined her hands into a small circle. 

“As big as your fist?” Chloé asked in shock, her hand fearfully covering her mouth when Marion confirmed it with a small nod. “My God… how horrifying…”

“Good.” Kari let out a sigh of relief, before catching herself. “I mean, it must have been a tarantula from the nearby marshes!”

“How did it make its way into the school?” Chloé asked, her jaw tightening so much Matthew feared that she might break her tooth. “I swear to God, if some freak keeps spider pets at the dorms, I’ll kill them myself!” 

“You should take Marion to the infirmary first, to make sure she wasn’t poisoned,” Kari hurriedly suggested. “Matthew and I will investigate the… uhm…”

“The drugs,” Matthew reminded her. Had she forgotten her own story already? 

“The drugs, yes.” Kari Matsumoto was a terrible liar, but she looked so earnest nobody dared to question her anyway. “Don’t worry Marion, Nurse Lily will patch you up in no time!”

Matthew watched Chloé carry Marion away with slight disappointment. While Kari let out a sigh of relief, he was somewhat saddened that they wouldn’t recruit a new Crawler today. If Marion’s mind already rationalized her ambush as a rational, mundane event, then it meant she lacked a Key. She would return to her life without ever remembering the monsters lurking in the dark. 

A sharp feeling of unease surged at the back of his skull. 

Foresight was the secret to longevity. That was why Matthew always had his Doom Sense up at all times. The spell lasted around three hours on him; six when empowered with the Accel spell. These two combined were a constant drain on his Flux reserves, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. You couldn’t put a price on an alarm signal inside your own head. 

Now, Doom Sense was a picky spell. It only warned its caster of lethal dangers. It didn’t differentiate between a HIV needle or a bullet, and it would ignore minor stuff like a punch in the face. Once boosted by Accel, it became twitchy enough to tell from which direction the threat came. 

And right now, the signal pointed to the toilet. 

Matthew checked the bowl for any toxic residue, but Doom Sense’s warning was growing weaker by the second. The waters had flushed away whatever triggered his inner alarm system. 

Had Marion picked up some alien juice before they rescued her? Dungeons only killed within their confines–since they fed on humans who died there–but they never all played by the same rules. 

Kari quickly noticed his unease. “Is something the matter, Matt?”

“I dunno,” Matthew confessed. “The toilet triggered my Doom Sense.”

“The toilet?” Kari frowned at it and pinched her nose. The place still reeked of Marion’s bowels. “She could have vomited poison, if the spider bit her before we could reach her.”

“Maybe,” Matthew conceded. Still, his Doom Sense would have forewarned him earlier if that was the case. 

“Whatever it was, Disbelief will take care of it. I’ll come back later to check on the area later. Just in case.” Kari smiled in relief. “We did good, Matthew.”

Matthew smiled back, though his eye lingered on the toilet nonetheless.

He had a bad feeling about this. 

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