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, 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.

But 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.

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“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 a dick.

“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, shut up!” 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 summon 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 them 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 couldn't 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, boosting her reflexes and then her intelligence. “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 usually mirrored normal reality, in a funhouse kind of way. 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.