Matthew rushed towards Maggie’s direction the moment he recognized her Flux signature.
He heard Kari call out his name in alarm and her hurried steps as she ran after him, but he didn’t stop. His legs carried him on their own. A single thought occupied his mind, alongside the sharp sting of guilt and panic.
Not again!
Matthew rushed through barely lit corridors, the walls shaking and the ceiling cracking. His Doom Sense buzzed louder with each step. The pressure grew sharper and stronger than what he experienced fighting the last Dungeon’s boss. He heard the toll of bells, followed by the sound of distant explosions.
He soon passed through an archway and entered some kind of enormous belfry, with a ceiling as high as a cathedral’s. Five alcoves surrounded the massive chamber, each of them housing a massive yellow bell dangling from a metal hook and rippling with Flux. Scorch marks covered the marble floor and a pair of towering golden doors lay closed to the north, their outline shimmering with purple particles.
The new monster hovered in the center of the room. It was huge and spherical, a giant purple neutron pulsing with Violet Flux that strained the very fabric of space around it. Eldritch sets of golden rings spun around its core like a planet’s outer rings, each of them covered in burning eyes.
They were all glaring at Maggie.
Matthew had only caught a few glimpses of her at school over the last few years, but they hardly changed his old friend. She was still the same tough, athletic tomboy always ready to pick a fight with whoever dared to give her a funny look, her harsh amber eyes glaring at the monster in defiance. Her orange anorak was shredded and the shirt underneath had been cut in multiple areas by sharp blades. Her left sleeve lay in tatters, and the brown skin underneath had partly turned to steel. She clearly wasn’t doing too good against that monster.
“Maggie!” Matthew proudly announced his presence to his old teammate, as he always used to once.
Her head snapped in his direction, her amber eyes filled first with surprise and then with suspicion. “You again?”
Not the warmest of greetings, but Matthew didn’t expect anything better. Ignoring her reaction, he decided against taking chances with the monster and began to remove his eyepatch. What better place to hold a neutron star than inside a black hole?
The floating wheel monster’s golden rings glowed brighter than the sun in response. A mighty yellow flash overwhelmed Matthew’s vision before he could unleash his black hole, temporarily blinding him. He let neither the pain nor the sudden blindness slow him down. His Flux Sight let him sense the energy radiating from the monster, so he simply looked up and focused on it.
Space bent around him as his wormhole hungrily began to feed on the world around itself. The Dungeon’s dust was immediately sucked inside, with the sudden air current causing the bells to toil louder and louder. Matthew was careful to orient himself so his black hole’s pull focused on the monster and kept Maggie’s Flux signature out of range.
He detected the monster being pulled towards him and then it pulsed with Violet Flux. The very fabric of space folded around Matthew, creating barriers suddenly confining him inside a much smaller space. His Doom Sense sent such a sharp spike of pain in his head that Matthew immediately pulled his eyepatch back on.
When his eye recovered enough from the light flash to distinguish colors again, he found himself trapped inside a violet cube. Paper-thin sheets of translucent, folded space surrounded him from all sides and kept him imprisoned.
Good thing Matthew covered his eye. His own technique would have sucked all of the air around him otherwise.
Having contained the bigger threat for the time being, the monster turned its gaze back on Maggie. Its many eyes lit up with a bright yellow light and then unleashed shining rays at their target. Maggie stomped the ground with her feet, red lightning crackling from her boots, and then rushed around the room in a blur of crimson speed. The monster’s rings spun at high-speeds, their lasers scorching the belfry in multiple directions. Burned lines of searing golden flames erupted on the marble walls and melted the bells’ surface wherever the rays touched them. One even reached Matthew’s prison, only for its energies to harmlessly slide off the cube’s surface.
Maggie zigzagged around the room in an attempt to avoid the beams. Her confusing, disjointed bursts of speed reminded Matthew of a groove dancer somehow trying to avoid a disco ball’s light rays. She made no move to assist Matthew, and though he expected that reaction, he couldn’t help but feel disappointed.
Kari caught up to them at this instant and immediately assessed the situation with a glance. In stark contrast with Maggie, she moved to assist Matthew by striking the cube at its angles. Its surface rippled and undulated at each strike without shattering.
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“Don’t worry about me,” Matthew said before pointing at Maggie. “Cover for her, she’s wounded!”
He had no idea if Kari heard him through his prison and over the bells’ toll, but she abided by his wishes nonetheless. His teammate rushed into the belfry with her rapier ready to strike and then quickly ascended to the ceiling with the Wallcrawl spell. Though she was nowhere near as fast as Maggie, her Key allowed her to predict and dodge the beams' trajectories.
Knowing that Maggie would quickly run out of Flux if she kept it up, Matthew punched the cube’s surface in an attempt to break free. He activated his Key and tried to force a hole open. His Yellow Flux collided with his Violet prison, its very opposite. The more Flux he poured into the exercise, the stronger the backslash. He felt like he was trying to open a path through a lake of water with hands made of fire.
Matthew hated all things Violet.
Nonetheless, the monster’s Flux reserves paled in comparison to his own. The prison slowly yielded to his Key’s power and his isolated pocket of space unfolded. The cube collapsed into purple particles the moment Matthew managed to puncture a hole through it.
A rotating beam of light immediately advanced to incinerate him.
Warned of the incoming danger by his Doom Sense, Matthew cast the Peak spell to bolster his speed and ran as fast as his legs would carry him. An aura of green and yellow emanated from his body. His limbs moved on their own and forced him to run in between the lasers.
Literally. His hands and feet acted, no, reacted to incoming danger without a single thought from his brain to direct them. Peak’s enhancements of his body seemed to act upon the warnings that Danger Sense sent them on their own.
That’s new, Matthew thought. His passive spells were reacting to each other like they did at the soccer match, their Flux wavelengths closely matching. He could hardly tell where his Peak started and where Doom Sense ended. That’s definitively new.
Kari, who had run along the entire length of the belfry’s wall and ceiling, fell upon the monster from above. Pivoting in a way that let her slip between the light rays and spinning rings, she reached the purple neutron core and struck it with her rapier. Whatever weak point she targeted with her Key caused a shining breach to open in the monster’s pulsating heart. It let out a droning noise and then a pulse of power that threw Kari off its body, though she managed to reorient herself as she landed on the floor with a cat’s grace.
“Target the weak point I hit!” Kari shouted as loudly as her lungs would allow her. “Widen the crack!”
Struggling against the influence of his own spells—which tried to keep his movements focused on evasion rather than offense—Matthew finger-gunned the core at the spot that Kari marked. Most of his holes manifested on the golden rings when they spun in the way of his attack, but a few opened next to the breach in the neutron core. Violet Flux leaked from it, then poured out in a flow of energy.
Matthew quickly guessed Kari’s plan. The Dungeon had hastily generated this monster as a powerful weapon without much consideration for its design. Its core struggled to contain the very power used to create it.
The monster let out another droning roar and closed its eyes. Its rings whirled before aligning vertically in the shape of a great blazing wheel. It landed on the ground in a thunderous crash, then attempted to roll over Kari and crush her with murderous focus. The Crawler elegantly leaped out of the way, but the monster swiftly did a U-turn in an attempt to roll over her once again.
It never got that far.
Maggie abandoned her evasive maneuvers to engage the monster in melee. Brushing the ground with her fingers, she swiftly activated her Orange Key. Her skin shifted to take on the color and texture of the marble floor until she became a living statue. She jumped in front of the monster, then grabbed its blazing wheel with her bare hands. Its mad dash came to an abrupt halt. Maggie did more than hold the monster in place with her superhuman strength; she slowly pushed her catch to her left, causing the rings to slightly lean towards the ground. The yellow flames surging from her foe hardly elicited a groan from her.
Kari and Matthew immediately seized the opportunity to finish their enemy off. The former leaped at the core and struck its weak point with her rapier while the latter nailed it with bullet holes. More Flux leaked out of the monster’s neutron heart, until the pressure became too much to bear.
The core shattered with a final alien shriek.
The golden flames covering the wheel died out the instant the monster’s heart erupted in a sea of purple light. The rings stopped spinning, allowing Maggie to toss them to the side. The corpse collapsed to the floor with a loud crash, and Matthew’s Doom Sense stopped buzzing at last. He allowed himself a moment to catch his breath, only for his Peak spell to suddenly fizzle out on its own and leave him winded.
Peak ran out? Impossible! No spell could ever hope to exhaust Matthew. Yet when he looked inside himself to check his immense reserves, he found them depleted by half. Did that spell combo drain me quicker than usual?
Maggie glared at the monster for a moment, as if half-expecting it to rise up for another round, then canceled her Key. Her skin returned to normal, though her fists remained tightly clenched.
“What are you doing here, Matthew?” Maggie asked without looking at him.
“My job,” Matthew replied. He could already tell that this wouldn’t go well. “Nice to meet you too, Maggie.”
“I don’t need your help.” Maggie glanced at Kari. “And who the hell are you?”
“My name is Kari Matsumoto. I’m class 3-A’s student council representative at our school.” Typical Kari thought it best to start with student credentials instead of her Crawler ones. “Nice to meet you.”
Kari politely extended a hand to Maggie.
Maggie looked at it for a moment before clumsily shaking it. She let go of Kari immediately after, much to her embarrassment.
“She’s your new teammate, Matthew?” Maggie's jaw clenched. “Don’t tell me she’s a Violet.”
“What are you insinuating?” Matthew asked with a scowl. Maggie’s comment made his blood boil. “Kari is a Blue.”
“Like Sam then. Must have been nice, replacing us like that.” Maggie’s gaze shifted from Matthew to Kari, and then back to him. “Does she know?”
Kari fidgeted in place, suddenly uncomfortable. “Know what?”
Maggie scowled darkly. “That we let Perse die?"