The match ended in victory for Matthew’s team. Kari scored a point, John another, and Tatiana’s missiles never came close to threatening the goalpost again. Funny how canceling the Lucky Star spell drastically reduced her number of successful passes in the second half.

Matthew wondered if he could create an offensive version of it. A spell that cursed a target with calamities and misfortune.

“It’s a fine draw-aggro technique,” Matthew told his teammates after they left the school’s locker rooms in one piece. Nothing better than a quick, Dungeon-free shower to soothe the bruises. “Anybody interested in learning it? You know, to catch enemy fire?”

“Why would I want to make it easier for enemies to hit me?” John replied with the most deadpan face imaginable.

“Matthew, promise me you won’t use that spell in a Dungeon,” Kari pleaded. “Seriously, don’t. It won’t end well.”

“Fine, I’ll stick to farming luck by playing Mario Kart,” Matthew conceded. Though Peak’s improvement quickened the body’s healing process, he doubted he would recover from the humiliation of nearly dying from a football match of all things. “Do you think my performance improved my popularity? I mean, Marlene invited me to the martial arts club…”

“Nobody dates the goalkeeper, Maruki,” John replied, shattering his teammate’s hopes. Kari simply rolled her eyes in annoyance.

“The two of you are impossible,” she complained before checking her phone. “And Sasha won’t answer me on the phone.”

“Oh right, she’s the pastor’s daughter?” Matthew asked. “I didn’t recall seeing her at the match.”

“She lives with her dad at the church,” Kari explained with a worried frown. “I hope nothing bad happened to her…”

Matthew thought they would find out soon enough.

True to his word, the Doc waited for them right outside the school. “Greetings, kids,” he said as they stepped out from inside his car. “How did your match go?”

“Like World War Two,” Matthew replied. “Can we stop at a lottery store on our way to the church? I’ve got a Marshall Plan check and lots of good luck to spend.”

“Shouldn’t you pray at church first?” John taunted him. “To stack the deck in your favor?”

“John has a point, Matthew,” the Doc said. “I would suggest keeping your stored fortune until after we complete the Dungeon, in case you need a stroke of luck in a pinch.”

Matthew shrugged. “Sure, I can wait a few hours to become a lottery millionaire high school dropout.”

Kari glared at him. “I won’t accept your resignation, Matt. We will all graduate together whether you want it or not.”

“I’m kidding.” Matthew crossed his legs and hung back in his seat. He was pumped for today’s Dungeon wrecking. “Let’s get this over with before dinner.”

A grim scowl spread on the Doc’s face. “I hope your enthusiasm isn’t misplaced, Matthew. Crypto reported a disappearance near the church yesterday evening.”

Kari tensed up. “Was it Sasha?”

“I think it was a young man,” the Doc replied, though it hardly reassured his student. The group reached the Rubens crossroads church a few minutes later. It was nearly noon by then, so the pastor was concluding the morning service. A dozen parishioners had parked their cars to seek his counsel. The church’s doors remained wide open, greedily, hungrily open.

Their classmate Sasha Amarie waited near the threshold, unaware of the danger nearby. A pretty girl with smooth brown skin and long black hair, she looked quite like the fashion killer with her gray beret, white scarf, and ample beige mantle. Her amber eyes shifted around the church’s parking lot in worry. She seemed to look for something in particular, only to grow anxious when she failed to find it.

“Oh, that’s Sasha!” Kari said upon noticing her. “She doesn’t look too happy…”

Matthew could guess why the moment he stepped out of the Doc’s car. The Dungeon’s aura had grown stronger since yesterday. An oppressive cloud of Violet and Yellow Flux radiated from the doors.

“This place has already killed someone,” he muttered under his breath, his fists clenching in anger.

Kari bit her lip in crestfallen consternation, while John let out a grunt. “We should have skipped the match,” he said harshly. “We wasted too much time.”

The Doc tried to reassure his students. “Do not blame yourselves. The Dungeon could have taken a victim last night, when we weren’t ready for it.”

Matthew understood that their mentor wanted to shelter them from the truth and encourage them to enjoy a normal life ‘off-hours,’ but it did little to console his students. John was right, they should have skipped the match and gone straight for the Dungeon.

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The Doc opened his car’s trunk and handed each of his students carefully prepared backpacks of supplies. Food, water, first aid kits, lamps… everything to survive an unexpectedly long trek through a Dungeon. A single, lengthy gym bag secretly filled with weapons completed the set. Afterward, Matthew’s group walked up to the church’s entrance, where Kari greeted Sasha with a forced smile. She couldn’t quite suppress her sadness at the fate of the Dungeon’s victims.

“Hi girl,” she told Sasha. “How is it going?”

“Kari? I didn’t expect to see you here.” Sasha answered her classmate’s grin with a scowl. “To tell you the truth, I’m worried.”

“Is it about the disappearance?” John asked before improvising a lie on the spot. “Matsumoto insisted that we visit you the moment we heard about it.”

“News travels fast,” Sasha replied, her hands disappearing into her mantle’s pockets. “Petro is missing.”

“Petro?” Kari’s eyes widened. “Isn’t that your b–”

“Shush!” Sasha hastily covered Kari’s mouth with her hand. “Dad is inside!”

“He’s your best friend?” Matthew replied with a falsely innocent tone. Sasha’s embarrassment quickly confirmed his suspicions.

“He’s a… a good friend staying with us at the church. I can’t find him anywhere since last night and he won’t answer my calls.” Sasha glanced at the church with a heavy gaze. “I wanted to ask Dad’s regulars whether or not they had seen him, but only a few of them showed up today, and those who did don’t recall anything.”

Matthew noticed that the Doc’s jaw noticeably clenched. These regulars most likely showed up at the church only to find themselves abducted the moment they approached the threshold.

“Anyway Kari, who is this guy?” Sasha asked as she noticed the Doc. “Your dad?”

“Doctor Finn O’Connor, from the neuroscience and neuropsychiatry department at Evermarsh University,” the Doc replied after clumsily shaking Sasha’s hand. Much like Kari, he couldn’t tell a lie to save his life. “You could say that I am her honorary uncle.”

“We decided to camp near the marshes for the weekend,” John easily lied. “Mr. O’Connor agreed to join us and give us a ride.”

“That’s very nice,” Sasha commented. “I’m more of a bookworm than an outdoors gal myself, but Petro likes nature. He would have loved to join you today.”

“Perhaps we can help you search for him,” the Doc replied before glancing at his students. “How about we ask the parishioners for more details? Miss Amarie might have missed something.”

“We won’t leave a stone unturned,” Matthew promised.

Sasha thanked the group politely and gave them a rough description of her suspiciously close friend, though she clearly didn’t believe anything would come of it. And unfortunately, she might be right. Few could survive more than a few hours in a Dungeon without a Key ability.

Matthew began to force the Dungeon’s entrance open the moment he and his team stepped through the threshold. He didn’t pay too much attention to Sasha or potential onlookers. He knew that Disbelief would rewire her brain to explain his team’s sudden disappearance somehow.

This Dungeon fought back against the intrusion attempt with great ferocity, but it yielded quickly; Yellow spoke to Yellow. A flash of golden and violet light soon swallowed his team whole. The dimensions around them shifted, as did the church’s entrance, its doors enveloping the Crawlers like the jaws of a great and hungry beast.

Matthew immediately sensed his Doom Sense softly buzzing in the back of his head, warning him of omnipresent danger. This Dungeon would prove many times more lethal than the one at school.

When they stepped through the threshold between worlds, the Crawlers soon found themselves in a grand marble hall leading into a vaster chamber beyond. Fanciful symbols of winged squids were etched on the walls, right above carved symbols that Matthew didn’t recognize. A powerful smell of ink and salt filled the air.

“Ouf,” Kari complained before pinching her nose. “This place stinks like a fishery.”

“No, Matsumoto.” John grabbed two handguns from under his vest, one for each hand. “It smells like a grave.”

Only then did Matthew notice it among the flavors in the air. That oh-so-familiar metallic tang, like dried rust.

Blood.

Matthew clenched his fists. “Loud?”

“Loud,” the Doc confirmed with a scowl. “This Dungeon is already transitioning to its second stage.”

“Which means that this place has claimed more than one victim,” Kari concluded with a harsh, determined gaze. She opened the weapon bag and brought out a reinforced fencing rapier. “Can you map a path, Matthew?”

“We’ll cover you,” John said as he charged his guns with his power, the barrels radiating with Red Flux.

Matthew focused on the ambient Flux and walked towards the next room, determined to carve a bloody path to the core. He immediately sensed the Dungeon trying to shroud its location by generating false signals in multiple directions.

“Something’s wrong,” the Doc said out loud what Matthew was thinking. “The Dungeon knows what we are and that we want to destroy its core.”

“It won’t change anything,” Matthew replied after quickly finding a clear lead to the north. “It won’t live long enough to attend mass.”

He stepped into the next room with his team hot on his tail and entered an immense domed hall over a hundred meters wide. The architecture reminded Matthew of an old-school Gothic cathedral, albeit with stained glasses representing winged squids rather than angels. Black stone pillars held the spiral-shaped ceiling high above their heads. As for the floor, its cracked marble surface showcased multiple traces of impact and bloody stains.

Four corpses littered the ground, and only one was human.

Matthew covered his mouth to suppress a wave of nausea, as did Kari. A pallid adult woman with far too many body parts missing occupied the center of the hall. Her likely killers, a trio of humanoids with priestly garbs and a mass of crimson talon-tipped tentacles for heads, lay dead nearby. One had been beaten to a black bloody pulp, another had its squishy skull squashed, and the last was missing everything below the waist.

Though the sight of the slaughter hardly phased John, the sight confused him nonetheless. “What is… Did one of the victims gain a Key?”

“Could be,” the Doc replied as he studied the ‘crime scene.’ His eyes followed the trail of red blood footprints leading to a stairway deeper into the complex. “Those are shoe prints.”

John’s guess was half-right. Monsters didn’t fight each other–with a single aberrant exception–so a human probably did this. However, no newly awakened Crawler should know of a core’s importance; and the fact that the Dungeon immediately attempted to hide it from intruders meant that someone else already tried to reach it.

Someone with experience.

“We’re not alone,” Matthew concluded. “Another Crawler got in there first.”