The Dungeon had reached its third stage, not the second.

  Matthew sensed it the moment his team forced the entrance open with a wormhole. The Plane Graveyard’s Dungeon offered little to no resistance to their intrusion attempt, with the trio swiftly finding themselves teleported into a suffocatingly hot chamber of coiling pipes and iron walls built from molten cars merged together. Stinking steam burst from the four-meter-high ceiling, lit up by flickering red lamps casting a bloody crimson glow on the Crawler crew.

  However, the temperature wasn’t the only thing making Matthew sweat. Not only was his Doom Sense buzzing threateningly at all times, but his Flux Sight detected other entrances further in the distance. The core didn’t produce as much of a blip on his radar however, which meant it was safely stored in a deeper level.

  “Shucks,” he said. “This Dungeon has more than one entrance, and a second level.”

  “This is deeply concerning,” John added with a scowl. “It has only been a week and a half since the last timeshift, and Chemtown is sparsely populated. It can’t have claimed enough victims to transform so quickly.”

  “Could its growth have something to do with Tarantulas?” Kari pondered as she examined the room they were in with her Key. Her body had gained a blue halo from all the support spells she had cast on herself. “If it can feed on any Dungeon’s Flux, maybe it picked some up from its previous nests to strengthen its current one?”

  “Possible,” John conceded. He searched around the room and noticed a set of locked metal doors at the end of a steel tunnel. “Odd that there’s no monster to welcome us.”

  “Hold down, Misfire, my spider sense is tingling faster than a vibrator right now,” Matthew warned his teammates. “We should prepare for a welcoming committee.”

  Kari scowled, her entire body tensing up. “We need to leave this room, right now.”

  “What, already?” Matthew protested. “Why?”

  “Because this chamber is a trap.” Kari pointed at a few spots where the pipes coursing through the walls and ceiling coiled in unnatural ways. “The foundations are more fragile than they let on and the door is actually a trigger. The ceiling will collapse on us the moment we open it.”

  John frowned. “What about the door, Matsumoto? Can we cross into the next room before the ceiling collapses?”

  Kari shook her head. “I wouldn’t risk it, especially since we have no idea what’s on the other side.”

  “I know a way to check.” Matthew opened his bag, brought out his notebook, and flipped the pages until he summoned Articat. His beloved monster popped out with a big wide grin. “Can you be a good boy and check out what’s behind that door?”

  Articat meowed and eagerly vanished back into his hole to move around the room. Kari shuddered behind Matthew as he did so. “I’m never getting used to its smile,” she said. “He’ll look like a serial killer on the loose if you give him a knife.”

  “I know, right?” Matthew nodded to himself. “That’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

  “At least it’s proving useful as an expandable scout,” John said. The three watched Articat slip beneath the distant door… only for the monster to return back to them just as swiftly. “Did your pet chicken out, Matthew?”

  “Articat would never run from a fight!” Matthew protested. His monster popped out of its hole in front of the crew. “What did you find?”

  He had yet to find a way to give Articat the ability to speak—that required a brain which a creature created from raw ink had little use for—but they had developed a very expressive, cartoonish sign language; enough that Matthew could roughly translate its report.

  “Nothing?” Matthew blinked in disbelief. “There’s nothing behind that door? Like a bottomless void?”

  Articat pointed at the nearest wall, much to Matthew’s sorrow. The answer was both disappointing and unoriginal.

  “Who puts a wall behind a door?” he complained to his team. “This Dungeon has no imagination!”

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “So the door is a trap and the real one is hidden somewhere else?” John asked.

  “No, I checked everywhere,” Kari protested. “There’s no other way out.”

  “So we do it my way and we start digging into the walls?” Matthew suggested.

  “I’ve told you, Matthew, the whole place will collapse on us if we do that.” Kari scratched the back of her head. “There must be a puzzle of some kind to solve.”

  “No,” John concluded with a deep scowl on his face. “This entrance is likely a dead-end, a trap. There’s no way to reach the core from here.”

  “But that’s… that’s illegal!” Matthew choked in outrage. That kind of unsporting architectural design went against all Dungeon etiquette! “You can’t start with a dead-end! That’s cheating!”

  “It wouldn’t be the first Dungeon’s core to play hard to get,” John mused back. “Let’s check out the other entrances to confirm my theory.”

  And thus, they exited the Dungeon for the first time. A quick survey of the junkyard showed that it actually had three entrances, one covering the place’s official threshold and two others located at holes in the fence.

  The second entrance the crew used led them into a metal tunnel similar to the first chamber, but much longer in length and with two sets of doors at the end. They barely took a step forward before Kari stopped them.

  “Trap.” Kari pointed at a spot midway through the tunnel. “The ceiling will fall on us once we walk past that point. The tiles ahead are trigger switches.”

  “So we must run ahead at full speed, wager everything on my Lucky Star spell, and then cross the right door in the nick of time?” Matthew happily suggested.

  “Or it’s a fake choice and they both lead nowhere,” John said, immediately shooting his awesome idea down. “Just send the cat to scout ahead by sticking to the wall, so he doesn’t trigger the switches.”

  Matthew pouted in disappointment, but followed through with the suggestion; and unfortunately, John was right. Articat found nothing behind either door besides other dead ends.

  Matthew was about to file a complaint with the Dungeon manager by the time they tried the third entrance. Thankfully, this one finally led somewhere interesting. The trio walked into a corridor plastered with colorful screens broadcasting random and glitchy pictures that would give anybody a seizure.

  Then Kari stopped them. “Trap.”

  “Again?” John complained. “The ceiling?”

  “The floor.” Kari pointed at a few spots near a handful of screens. “Those are counterweighted traps. I assume we’ll fall into pits if we walk on them.”

  So many traps… A terrible suspicion began to form in Matthew’s mind. A horrible possibility was now becoming more and more likely.

  “Guys…” he cleared his throat. “I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news… but we’ve yet to find any monsters.”

  His teammates exchanged a glance, with Kari joining her hands in prayer. “Please tell me it’s not what I think it is.”

  “Let’s stay on the lookout,” John insisted, an edge of despair cutting through his voice. The idea of a Dungeon lacking in monsters annoyed that trigger-happy fiend as much as Matthew. “Tarantulas can’t be this place’s only occupant.”

  The trio searched every inch of the corridor, avoiding one pit trap after the other. Kari and Matthew went further ahead while John examined the screens and eventually reached the end of it. The back end of a car lay encrusted into the wall, its trunk firmly closed. The mere sight of it sent Matthew’s Doom Sense buzzing in the back of his skull.

  “Mimic?” Matthew asked almost pleadingly.

  “Trap,” Kari replied after checking the car trunk, crushing his hopes. “I can smell the gunpowder. It’ll blow up in our faces if we try to open it.”

  “Some of the screens are holograms,” John informed them. He raised a gun at one of them, the barrel phasing through without a sound. “I can’t say whether they lead to dead ends or new passageways yet.”

  “Let me check this one,” Kari said as she hurriedly peeked through the hologram… and then quickly took a step back, her skin paler than a corpse.

  “Monsters?” Matthew asked, crossing his fingers.

  “Traps.” Kari held back tears of frustration. “Lasers.”

  By the time they had to exit the Dungeon at sundown, the crew had cleared a grand total of three rooms.

  Three. Rooms.

  The trio looked like zombies ready to collapse by the time they walked back to Mr. Auguste’s Porsche. They had made miniscule progress by the sweat of their brows and at the cost of immense emotional damage.

  “My god,” Mr. Auguste said upon seeing them. “Was it so terrible?”

  Kari covered her face to hide her tears. “It’s a Saw-type Dungeon.”

  “What?” Mr. Auguste straightened up in both horror and pity. “There are no monsters inside?”

  “No!” Matthew collapsed to his knee and let out a roar of pure, unadulterated frustration to the heavens. “It’s just trap after trap after trap! It has bombs, lasers, pits… the whole Swiss army knife!”

  “It might take us weeks to clear this place,” John complained through grinding teeth. “We’ll have to double-check every fucking room.”

  Some extremely rare and much feared Dungeons abandoned the idea of sending out monsters altogether, and instead revolved around traps. Every member of the Dungeon Wreckers Association feared encountering one, because clearing them was a long and agonizing process with no enemy to break the monotony. It was just nerve-wracking torture.

  A Saw-type.

  “Can’t you blow a hole in the walls, lad?” Mr. Auguste asked Matthew. "It worked for us with the last one."

  “I tried, twice.” Matthew sobbed. “The ceiling nearly collapsed on us the first time I opened a hole. The second time? Lava poured out.”

  And the worst part of all of this?

  They couldn’t find any treasure! There wasn’t a single shot of loot-fueled dopamine to soothe the pain! Tarantulas had picked the perfect nest for itself!

  This… Matthew thought as he glared at that looming fortress of a junkyard. This might be our toughest challenge yet.

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