“Another Crawler?” John turned to look at the Doc. “Did another team tackle the Dungeon first?”

“Crypto would have informed me if it were the case,” the Doc replied with a frown. “What makes you think it was an experienced Crawler, Matthew?”

“A hunch,” Matthew replied. “The Dungeon tried to keep its door locked a bit too tightly for a first-timer, and it hid its core before it even learned that we were looking for it.”

“Which suggests that they’ve already faced an intruder aiming for the core.” The Doc pondered his student’s words, then joined his hands together. A wave of empowered Blue Flux erupted from his body and spread across the hall. “I will try to locate them.”

“Could it be a new Crawler?” Kari pondered. “Someone we don’t know?”

John looked at Matthew. “Or someone we do.”

Matthew clenched his jaw. Only Maggie would be willing to tackle a Dungeon solo, and she wasn’t the religious type.

Unless… unless she was visiting Perse’s grave today and noticed the aura around the church’s entrance…

Aw, shucks.

“I’m picking up three different human signals in multiple directions,” the Doc said after completing his scan, much to his group’s sudden relief. The Dungeon hadn’t yet killed all of its victims. “I assume one of them is the Crawler intruder, but I cannot tell them apart from other survivors.”

“We should focus on rescuing them,” Kari said immediately. “One of them could be Sasha’s b–”

Matthew’s Doom Sense suddenly flared in the back of his skull.

His head snapped at the source of the alarm: the ceiling. The stained glass windows above them had begun to undulate like water pools. Purple Flux spread on their surface and altered the very fabric of space.

“Teleporters!” Matthew managed to shout a warning. “The wind–”

A hailstorm of flaming javelins surged from the portals before he could complete his sentence.

The Doc immediately raised his right hand at the incoming projectiles and swiftly unleashed a White Flux pulse from his palm. A beehive-shaped barrier of immaculate energy suddenly manifested around the group, slimmer than a paper sheet and yet stronger than a castle’s wall. The fiery javelins bounced off the shield like a flurry of fireworks.

Their attackers emerged from the stained glass portals in a great flock of dozens. They vaguely resembled angels, except Matthew doubted that the Lord’s soldiers would have squirming tentacles and a single glowing eye lurking under their metal helmets of justice. They descended on wings of shimmering fractal light and spears of golden fire magically materialized in their squirming hands.

“What did the Bible say about angels?” Matthew mused as he pointed a finger gun at the monsters. “Ah yes. Be not afraid.”

He shot one of the monsters like a fish in a barrel the moment the Doc dropped his barrier. A hole opened in the creature’s helmet, and it went crashing down onto the floor below.

“Beetle Formation!” the Doc shouted an order. They originally named their moves after letters, but Matthew successfully lobbied for animal code names instead. “I’ll cover you!”

The students immediately formed a tight triangle around the Doc, with Kari grabbing a gun from the weapons reserve to go along with her rapier, and then opened fire at the angels. Biblical javelins and lead bullets crossed paths across the hall. Those that met each other exploded in bursts of fire, but most reached their intended targets.

True to his word, the Doc focused on defense. Whenever a javelin threatened to touch one of his students, he immediately intercepted it with a short-lived barrier. The White Flux shields each lasted less than a second, stopping attacks and then vanishing to let his allies’ own projectiles through.

His students each focused on a different direction to cover all their angles. To Matthew’s annoyance, he once again began to lag behind his teammates; between John’s redirected bullets and Kari’s own supernatural accuracy, they began to rack up quite the angel kill count. These Lovecraftian caricatures were surprisingly agile and swiftly moved out of the way of Matthew’s finger guns whenever he pointed at them. His bullet holes turned the ceiling into swiss cheese without slaying a single new monster.

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I should just swallow them all with a black hole. That would be thematically appropriate, but the Doc would tell him not to waste that card on the small fry. Nah, I just need to play this smart. Stop focusing on moving targets.

Turning his attention away from the angels to the portals summoning them into the hall, Matthew began firing at them. The monsters couldn’t emerge halfway through the stained glass windows before a headshot brought them down to the ground.

“Excellent call, Matthew!” the Doc congratulated him on his initiative, while John mumbled ‘camper’ under his breath. Dozens of angel corpses soon dropped to the ground below.

Matthew opened his mouth to boast when he sensed a mighty pulse of Yellow and Violet Flux course through the air. A short tremor shook the hall and the remaining half a dozen angels suddenly halted their assault. Their bodies exploded into bursts of yellow and violet particles which disappeared through the portals.

“What’s happening?” John asked. “They’re self-destructing?”

Matthew didn’t believe it. Monsters were extensions of the Dungeon, cells without a will of their own. They had no sense of self-preservation and usually fought until death. Moreover, their dead kindred vanished into the floor too, their remains disappearing in a flood of energy.

“The Dungeon harvested their Flux,” Kari guessed, her hands tightly gripping her weapons. “It’s gathering power.”

The Doc’s eyes widened in alarm. He immediately began to cast the same Blue spell he used to locate the survivors. Matthew swiftly began to imitate him by activating his Flux Sight and focusing on his environment.

The core’s Flux signature was growing distant.

Not weaker, no. Its decoys all disappeared at once, but the heart of the Dungeon continued to pound energy with more strength than ever. The pulse strengthened, yet the core slowly slipped out of Matthew’s senses.

The Doc’s eyes widened in astonishment. “The Dungeon is creating a new level.”

When a Dungeon consumed enough lives and gathered enough energy, it began to create new levels to bury its undefended core. That transformation marked their second stage of development, the Growth.

Matthew could only see two ways for this church to reach it in a day’s time. Either it had abducted a lot more people than they thought, or it was hastily sacrificing other resources in a last-ditch attempt to protect its core from the first intruder. Flux spent to build rooms couldn’t be used to make monsters or traps.

Which meant the current level would undergo a sudden and massive case of downsizing.

Realizing the danger first, Matthew immediately grabbed Kari’s shoulder with one hand and reached for the Doc with the other.

A violet flash swallowed them all before they could make contact.

When the light died out, the floor had vanished.

Matthew barely had time to catch a glimpse of spiraling walls of black stone coiling around him before he began to fall into a deep shaft. He and Kari dropped down several meters toward a bed of spikes.

Matthew lacked depth perception, but their perspectives looked grim.

“Hang on, Matt!” Kari dropped her gun, grabbed her teammate by the wrist mid-fall, and tried to reach the nearest wall. Her hands and the tip of her fingers glowed with Green Flux. “I’ve got you!”

Kari managed to touch the pit’s wall with her feet while still holding on to her rapier. Their quick fall slowed to a complete crawl in seconds, the sudden stop nearly causing Matthew to throw up. When he looked at his teammate, she was sticking to the black stone like a certain comic book character while carrying him with one hand.

“When did you become Spider-Woman?” Matthew asked in disbelief.

“Wallcrawl spell.” Kari let out a huff of exhaustion. Her teeth grinded against each other and a green aura flickered around her. “Can’t keep it and Peak both up for long though.”

“Ugh, we were supposed to learn Wallcrawl together!” Matthew complained before pointing at the wall. “Can you bring me closer?”

Kari drew upon the power of the Peak spell and lifted him next to the wall. Matthew immediately punched the stone while triggering his Wormhole Key. His power created a circular cavity large enough for two people.

Kari dangled Matthew closer to their new refuge until he managed to safely step inside it. She swiftly joined him, though they had to squeeze a bit.

“I hate Violet Dungeons,” Matthew complained. “They always change their layout midway through.”

“You're telling me.” Kari glanced into the shaft and what fate awaited them below. The distance between them and the floor dizzied the mind. “This one is vicious too. We were seconds away from being impaled like sausages.”

“With a bit too much ketchup for my liking,” Matthew replied before noticing the way Kari gasped for breath. “Are you wounded?”

“No, just a little winded,” Kari replied with a strained smile. She was clearly trying to hide her exhaustion from managing two Green spells at once. “I’m tougher than I look."

“I’ve got food and a medical kit in my bag, should you need either,” Matthew reassured her. “Let me cast a quick Pulse first.”

Pulse was perhaps the easiest White spell to master, since it simply involved unleashing a burst of Flux to signal one’s location. Dungeon Wreckers Association procedure demanded that a team’s members cast it whenever they were forcibly separated to make it easier to regroup.

Matthew sensed two Pulses echoing his own in the distance. The first energy signature belonged to the Doc, and the second to John. Both seemed to be next to each other and each sent a single signal.

Good. One Pulse meant safe. Two or more per person meant trouble.

“The Doc and Misfire are alive and together,” Matthew informed Kari before grabbing a water bottle from his bag and tossing it to his teammate. “And safe too. Should have started with that one.”

“Good.” Kari sighed in relief. “How far away are they from us?”

“I would say…” Matthew clenched his jaw. “Half a city block away.”

And now they had to find a way to regroup.