Parc-Magritte looked so peaceful in the twilight.

  Winter snow hadn’t yet blanketed everything and the trees had only begun to change to their Autumn colors, leaving its lush and green spaces untouched. The city’s administration planted scented flowers in the summer to bathe it all in sweet fragrances, which Matthew appreciated. It helped soothe his mind, put him at ease, and most importantly, it helped hide the smell of dog shit left by half this city’s pets.

  He and his teammates stared at the sunset reflecting on a small lake from their public bench. None of them spoke. Kari had bought them a sushi box, but nobody ate. John had sent messages to Crypto and the Doc to give a report on what happened, but nobody read the countless replies. Matthew had purchased another shirt to replace his damaged one, but didn’t put it on.

  They simply stared at the water while trying to put their thoughts in order.

  Kari sipped from a soda can and then handed it to Matthew. The sugar tasted bland on his tongue, and the dopamine rush came too slowly for his liking. His back itched along the claw trace. The monster hadn’t reached the skin, though Matthew knew that it could have left a wound had it wished to.

  That cut hadn’t been an attack, but a reminder.

  John finally found the courage to address the elephant in the room. “That monster–”

  “Was death,” Matthew cut in. It was a miracle they managed to escape the Mall unscathed. “We were luckier than most.”

  Kari gave Matthew a long hard look. He could tell she struggled to muster up the courage to ask a question that had been bothering her for a while, and eventually succeeded.

  “What happened that day, Matthew? Between you and…” Kari cleared her throat. “Maggie?”

  Matthew looked away at a tree. He had caught Kari catching herself at the last moment so she wouldn’t say the ‘P’ name out loud.

  He was tempted to tell her that it wasn’t her business, the same way he told John to drop the matter last week, but he was too tired to muster up the anger for it. Moreover, they had seen the Mall; sensed the thing lunging at them with nothing but murder on its mind. They should know what is awaiting them should they find themselves in that place again.

  Besides, the three of them had been hunting together for a good while now. Maybe… maybe they deserved to know.

  Matthew hesitated a moment before answering with a question of his own. “Have you watched Stranger Things?”

  “Yes,” both of them replied. At least that series had survived the timeshifts thus far.

  “I had a band of friends like that in middle school,” Matthew confessed. “There were six of us, thick as thieves. Maggie, her brother Jack, Sam, Ulysses, and…”

  His throat grew dry. Even now her name wouldn’t come out.

  “And Perse?” Kari kindly finished for him.

  “Yes, Ulysses’ sister.” And Matthew’s first crush too. “We were all Crawlers with no overlapping colors.”

  John choked in disbelief. “All of you? That’s quite the coincidence.”

  “Yup, we formed a full rainbow, minus white. I was the first to gain a Key and they all gained one when I invited them to visit a Dungeon.” Matthew scoffed. In hindsight, that had been pretty stupid of him. “Most didn’t even have monsters back then, and the few that did weren’t super dangerous yet, so we just treated them as secret hideouts or fun treasure hunts.”

  “You went in blind,” John guessed, his scowl darkening even further. “I can see where this is leading.”

  “We couldn’t, so one day…” Matthew’s breath grew short and his brain hurt in his skull. Merely recalling the incident caused him a headache. “We went shopping for Christmas at Mr. Chang’s mall and noticed an entrance.”

  Matthew hadn’t slept well the night before that horrible day after realizing he had forgotten to buy a gift for his mom, and spent that morning struggling between sleepiness and anxiety. If he hadn’t… the Doc told him he shouldn’t dwell on the past like this, but the question continued to haunt Matthew for years.

  “We walked in expecting to have a fun side adventure before Christmas Eve,” Matthew said, his grip subconsciously tightening on his soda can until it bent. “Instead… instead we found that thing beating another monster to death.”

  “They were… they were fighting each other?” Kari asked, her voice so low Matthew could barely hear her. “That’s… that’s not possible.”

  “Monsters are the extension of the same Dungeon,” John said with skepticism. “Why would one monster kill another when they’re part of the same hivemind?”

  “Because that one is self-aware.” Matthew lowered his can and took a deep breath. “Do you know why Dungeons rarely create smart monsters, John? Even though it’s no harder than creating money out of thin air for them?”

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  John squinted at him and quickly guessed the answer. “Smart predators don’t get along?”

  “Most monsters are programmed to kill anything that isn’t them from birth,” Matthew confirmed. Creatures that faked docility like the Major Chicken’s animatronic waiters were the exception rather than the rule. “So how do you think a hyper violent predator behaves once it becomes smart enough to tell that other monsters are different? That they might be plotting to attack it the same way it’s always thinking about killing intruders?”

  “There were no other monsters in that place besides that one,” Kari recalled. “Did that thing kill them all?”

  Matthew nodded slowly. “That’s a smart monster for you,” he said while finishing his soda. “A wolverine with superpowers.”

  Hence why they had to find and kill Tarantulas before it turned out the same way.

  “We… we’d never encountered a truly dangerous monster before, so…” Matthew gulped, his throat dry all of a sudden. “We didn’t take precautions, and…”

  “That’s okay, Matthew,” Kari said out of misplaced kindness. “I… I can imagine.”

  “No, you can’t,” Matthew snapped. He hated empty consolations. “You can’t, and that’s good.”

  His words caused Kari to wince, which Matthew immediately regretted. “I’m sorry,” she immediately apologized. “I didn’t mean…”

  Matthew shook his head. The attack happened so fast Matthew only remembered a few flashes of crimson terror; horrifying images of Ulysses being thrown against a wall so hard his spine snapped from the blow, of a claw lunging for his eyes, of Perse’s blood hitting his face–

  The memory caused him physical pain and jostled Matthew’s mind back to the present. He heard his can hit the floor, his hands massaging his temples as he struggled against the headache. Why did it always hurt whenever he tried to remember?

  “You okay, Matthew?” John asked, which took Matthew aback. John never called him by his name, let alone with what could pass for concern.

  “I have ibuprofen in my bag,” Kari said. She quickly looked inside it and gave Matthew a pill alongside a bottle of water. “Here.”

  “Thanks,” Matthew replied before swallowing the medicine and following through with some water. It helped with the migraine a bit, though not by much.

  “Do you feel better?” Kari asked. “If not, I have more.”

  “I’m fine,” Matthew lied, mostly for her sake. He knew his friend was a worrywart and he didn’t want her to obsess over his health. He would need to power through the pain. “When we managed to flee… when we managed to flee, I had lost an eye and Perse… Perse was dead.”

  The thing had beaten Ulysses and Maggie into a coma too. They both would have perished without their country’s better-than-average healthcare system, and even then Ulysses still suffered from after-effects to this day.

  “Mr. Chang eventually awakened as a Crawler after investigating the disappearances in his establishment,” Matthew concluded. “We tried to destroy the Mall many times, but the Association eventually decided it was easier to simply seal it away. I haven’t returned to that place since.”

  A short silence hung between the crew, until Matthew felt an arm moving over his shoulders. Kari pulled him into a tight hug before he knew it, squeezing him hard like he were some kind of human teddy bear.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, so kindly, so warmly. “What you and the others went through was awful.”

  Matthew wasn’t sure how to react to that. Kari’s touch was clumsy—he had the feeling that she never hugged a boy her age, period—but a hug… a hug always felt nice. So he returned it and squeezed back.

  Kari eventually let go of Matthew with sheepish embarrassment, but she succeeded in her goal. He did feel a little better.

  John didn’t join in, since he wasn’t the sentimental type. However, neither did he follow through with a jab like Matthew half-expected him to. He simply stared at the fading sun for a while and drank from his own soda can.

  “Why couldn’t you kill that creature?” he finally asked. “You, Chang, and the others?”

  “Because it doesn't stay dead,” Matthew retorted. “It adapts to everything we throw at it. Drown it? It stops needing to breathe. Put it in time-stasis? It breaks out, but now it can cast the spell back at you. Burn it? It learns to breathe fire. And if something works once, the Mall revives it within minutes.”

  All their attempts at killing the monster only managed to strengthen it.

  “Then why not simply bypass it then?” John insisted. “Destroy the Mall’s core and collapse the Dungeon?”

  “Because the Mall has multiple levels, and you can’t access them without destroying the thing first. It’s a serpent eating its own tail issue.” Some among the Association had considered bringing the monster out of a Dungeon, but the risk of it adapting to Disbelief and then going on a rampage was simply too great. “Nobody has found a way to bypass that defense.”

  “I see…” John pondered his explanations for a moment before letting out a heavy sigh. “My mother nearly died in a Dungeon.”

  Both his teammates looked at him at once in shared surprise. John never talked about his family.

  “She took me to the zoo when I was fourteen,” John explained. He didn’t raise his tone, but Matthew could almost taste the quiet rage in his voice. “A Dungeon had taken over the gift shop and caught us. I managed to pull us out when I gained my Key, but my mother’s mind couldn’t reconcile what she went through with reality. Disbelief messed with her brain until she developed an acute case of schizophrenia.”

  A pit formed in Matthew’s stomach. “So her illness–”

  “Is their fault,” John interrupted with a Russian winter’s coldness. He finished his soda and then tossed the empty can into a nearby recycle bin. “I’ve sworn I’d destroy all Dungeons that day, so let me make you a promise of my own, Maruki.”

  John rose from the bench and then looked at his teammates, his back straight, his posture firm and resolute.

  “We’ll wipe out the Mall from the face of the Earth one day,” he said with iron confidence and determination. “No ifs or buts. We’ll wreck that Dungeon until nothing but rubble remains.”

  Kari’s lips curved into a thin smile. “I can get behind that.”

  “Haven’t you listened to a word of what I just said?” Matthew retorted. “It’s invincible.”

  “How can you call yourself this city’s best Crawler with that mindset?” John snorted. “There’s no problem without a solution.”

  “He’s right, Matthew,” Kari added. “Combining spells of a different color was thought to be impossible too, and yet we did it. I’m sure we’ll find a way to destroy that place one day too.”

  “So the real question is, will you keep wallowing in your corner?” John asked Matthew, his finger pointed at him. “Or are you going to step up and fight?”

  Matthew had tried to destroy the Mall so often that he had more or less given up on it. Words were cheap, doubly so when they crashed flat against reality’s wall.

  Nonetheless, John wasn’t the kind of person to offer empty promises. He never sugarcoated anything. This hadn’t earned him many friends, but it gave his promises all the more weight; and when Matthew heard him speak with such confidence, he found himself daring to do something he hadn’t found the strength to do in many years.

  To hope.

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Matthew replied.

  Blood & Fur series (covering the second stretch of the Xibalba arc) has now launched on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited! As always, I would appreciate any reviews or shouts!

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