Matthew stared at the Doc in disbelief.

  “Entities?” he repeated, the word heavy with meaning. “Doc, are you saying our Keys are…” His tongue clicked in his mouth. “Alive?”

  “They are,” the Doc confirmed. “After extensive tests on dozens of Crawlers and analyzing multiple Dungeon cores over countless missions, I can confirm that the Flux signatures between the two only vary in intensity, not nature. Moreover, Keys are emphatically connected to their users’ personality the same way a Dungeon reflects the area it is bound to. The similarities are simply too great to ignore.”

  Matthew struggled to process the implications. A sick feeling passed over him, followed by a shade of black in his aura. “We have cores inside us?”

  The Doc nodded sharply. “Take what I am about to tell you with a grain of salt, Matthew, since I’m still investigating this… but I’ve begun to consider the possibility that Keys and Dungeons are the same entities, except that some cores bond to a person and others to a location. In fact, it is possible that Keys arrived first and Dungeons second, not the other way around as we first thought.”

  “It… shouldn’t work that way,” Matthew replied with skepticism. He was an open-minded person, but the Doc’s latest idea pushed the envelope. “I mean, we all gained our Keys in a Dungeon.”

  “I’m not so sure about the gain part, Matthew,” the Doc replied. “We’ve been trying to artificially create Crawlers for years without success, which made me ponder if we weren’t approaching the matter on a wrong assumption: that people didn’t gain Keys in Dungeons, and instead awakened them there.”

  Matthew’s eye widened in surprise. “You’re saying that we all had a Key before we entered Dungeons?”

  “I find this possibility more and more credible, yes.” The Doc finished his hot chocolate and set it aside. “We know that Disbelief negatively impacts spells and Keys. It is possible that some individuals have powers slumbering inside them as we speak, but subconsciously suppress their powers until they are exposed to the supernatural.”

  Matthew’s stomach lurched, and no amount of hot chocolate could wash away the growing feeling of sickness. The thought that his powers—an immense source of pride for him—would derive from a Dungeon core slumbering inside him disturbed him.

  It was like looking into a mirror and seeing the enemy’s face staring back at him.

  “Why?” he asked, though he didn’t expect the Doc to provide an answer. “Why would some Dungeons bond to us rather than eat us?”

  “We know for a fact that Dungeons gain something from humans, since they do not show interest in other animals and do not grow when consuming them,” the Doc said. “It may be that Keys are cores that elected to live in symbiosis with humankind rather than prey on them, much like microorganisms in our gut help digest our food in exchange for a warm place to live and feed. The only difference between them and diseases is that the former figured out the best way to work with us rather than against us. If we follow this trail of thought, then Dungeons might arise when a core fails to properly bond to a human and mutates into a predatory entity in order to survive.”

  Matthew shuddered. “Like cancer?”

  “Like cancer,” the Doc replied. “Once again, Matthew, I ask you to take everything I just said with a grain of salt. There are still too many mysteries about Keys and Dungeons for us to reach a definitive consensus on their origins.”

  “Yes, I understand.” Matthew nodded to himself, though the Doc’s information still bothered him greatly. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “I’m sorry,” the Doc apologized. “I organized this session for your sake and we ended up talking about my research.”

  “No, no, it’s fine.” Matthew loved bouncing around ideas about magic, spells, and Keys. However much the possibility that he derived his powers from a core disturbed him, he would rather understand them rather than wallow in ignorance. “Maybe I’ll learn a spell to create myself a mansion of my own one day.”

  “I’m looking forward to that day.” The Doc smiled at Matthew, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Whatever the case, I will do everything in my power to assist you in uncovering your lost memories… if you wish to do so, that is.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “I do,” Matthew confirmed with a nod. “I don’t like burying my head in the sand.”

  He could understand why his younger self went through with the decision—even mere glimpses of his trauma gave him headaches and panic attacks—but John had a point; finding any information about the first Dungeons might help them in their war. Uncovering that mystery could even let them figure out a way to destroy the Mall one day.

  More than anything, it felt disrespectful to Perse and the others to simply forget it all. She deserved to be remembered.

  The Doc’s smile faded away. Matthew could tell that he accepted his answer, yet couldn’t hide his concern for his protégée.

  “Matthew,” his mentor said, his tone heavier than before. “Whatever you find buried deep inside those holes won’t bring you happiness. You understand that, yes?”

  Matthew clenched his jaw. His aura shifted from black and blue to a pristine white; from fear to acceptance.

  “I know, Doc,” he replied. “But I have to see this through.”

  Matthew and the Doc spent the rest of the session bouncing ideas around about how to recover his lost memories, which mostly revolved around exploring and refining the Sentimental World spell further. The Doc reasoned, probably correctly, that no Blue spell or equivalent could undo what a Yellow Key did; only spells of the same color would let them make progress. Kari’s suggestion that they create a ‘hack’ to bolster Sentimental World also sounded viable.

  As a wise cartoon character once said, only magic could defeat magic.

  In any case, Matthew walked out of the office with more questions on his mind than when he came in. He found Kari and John checking a map of Evermarsh in the waiting room outside and scribbling words on it.

  “You two-timing bastards!” Matthew pouted. “Were you planning the next Dungeon raid without me?”

  “I thought we agreed to settle on an open Dungeon relationship?” John joked back. “You took your sweet time in there, Matthew.”

  “I can’t help it if adults want me around more than you,” Matthew replied before sitting next to Kari. “You’re up, Misfire.”

  John snorted, then surrendered the map to his teammate. “You can brief him, Matsumoto,” he said as he walked into the Doc’s office. “I won’t be long.”

  “Wait…” Matthew stifled his laughter once the office’s door closed. “Did he just call me by first name instead of the last?”

  “I’ve noticed,” Kari replied with a giggle. “I think he likes you a little more now.”

  “And all it only took was over a year of working together, dozens of life-threatening situations, and unveiling my tragic past,” Matthew mused. “Feels nice, though.”

  “You tell me, he still calls me Matsumoto.” Kari sighed. “We just received a message from Crypto. The Association will hold a wake for the Old Town team on Sunday morning after the next meeting.”

  It didn’t surprise Matthew. Such events had become almost routine over the past year. Not even the people collecting their death pool bets rejoiced over it.

  “Why do you fight Dungeons, Kari?” Matthew suddenly asked. The question had been bugging him since yesterday. “We’ve learned Misfire’s reason and you know mine, but I don’t think I ever asked about yours.”

  “Besides saving lives?” Kari scratched her cheek and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t recall any particular incident that put me on this path, to be honest. My uncle was a policeman, so I guess you can say I was just raised this way.”

  So she didn’t have any life-changing trauma. That might explain why she had her head on her shoulders.

  “Sorry,” Kari apologized, as if lacking a tragic backstory was somehow a bad thing. “It probably sounds underwhelming.”

  “It’s okay, I find it refreshing to have a well-adjusted teammate without daddy issues.” Matthew then checked his teammates’ map. He expected it to list all the Dungeons in the area, only to spot Crawlers’ names scrawled on it. He spotted his own, Maggie’s, Kim’s and Mister Chang’s. “You’re planning a raid?”

  “No, no.” Kari pointed at his old house’s location. “John found it strange that your childhood friends all gained Keys of different colors, and it made me curious too.”

  Knowing what the Doc told him, Matthew was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t more to it too. “So you put us all on a map, conspiracy style?” he asked. “Yeah, we all lived in the same general area. That’s how we became friends in the first place.”

  “So did half the Association,” Kari said, a frown forming on her face.

  Matthew’s head snapped at her in surprise. “Huh?”

  “As student council president, I have access to student records,” Kari explained, her cheeks turning pink. “I, uh… I know I shouldn’t do that, but… I kind of checked where everyone lived at one point or another and noticed a pattern…”

  Matthew’s heart pounded hard in his chest as he put two and two together. He checked the map to see too familiar names a few houses rows away from his own.

  “Sasha and Amélia both lived in my district?” he muttered out loud in surprise.

  “In 2015, before both of their families moved out,” Kari confirmed. She pointed at Mr. Chang’s name. “I’ve messaged a few of our colleagues about their whereabouts in 2015, and it turned out that many of us lived near your old place during that time. The only Crawlers who don’t fit this pattern are those who arrived in the city a few years later like Petro and I.”

  “You think something happened there during that year,” Matthew guessed. “An event that gave us our Keys.”

  Kari’s jaw clenched on its own. “It can’t be a coincidence, can it?”

  No, it couldn’t. Not when sorcery was involved. Moreover, Matthew had a pretty good idea of what might have caused this surge in Crawlers.

  A Dungeon infestation always followed a timeshift. If Keys and Dungeons were indeed the same kind of entities, then this could only mean one thing.

  History had changed a lot more than five times.

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