David “Overtime” Chang only cared about three things: his business, his gym routine, and his daughter Kim, in that exact order.

  The gym part showed. Mr. Chang was a large mass of muscles tightly bound inside a yellow shirt, tight beige pants, and a black tie. He was ruggedly handsome behind his black glasses, with that Superman jaw and Hiroyuki Sanada’s killer looks. Matthew hoped he would look like him once he grew up, hopefully without losing his soul to a miserable adult life of soulless wage work.

  David Chang took care of himself because he was a man on a mission, an apostle of the holy grind. He worked ten hours a day and spent two more hitting the gym to stay in shape in-between Dungeon runs. Somehow he also managed to set aside eight hours of his time to spend with his teenage daughter Kim per week, but never any more. Parental attention should be like a pay raise in Mr. Chang’s mind: rare and earned.

  Or at least, that was what Kim told Matt the last time he visited them. He found her tale deeply upsetting. Matt rarely saw his parents since their divorce, but at least he didn’t skip family calls to work out.

  This tale had confirmed what Matt always thought: sports destroyed families.

  Oh, and his Key ability was busted. So much Riley didn’t see fit to assign him teammates.

  “I’ll cut straight to the chase,” Mr. Chang said after inviting Matthew to sit with him at the bar. Mr. Chang did not believe in wasting time, or small talk. “Your friend has been poking near the Mall’s condemned entrances lately, often at night. I don’t like it.”

  “Which friend?” Matthew asked, as if he had any besides the people in this very room.

  “The athletic girl,” Mr. Chang said, which didn’t ring a bell at first. “The delinquent with an attitude problem.”

  “Oh, you mean Maggie.” As if it could have been anybody else. “She wants to break into the place on the…” A knot formed in Matthew’s stomach. “The anniversary.”

  He felt Mr. Chang’s sharp gaze lingering on him from behind his sunglasses. “Does she have a death wish?”

  Matt’s jaw clenched. “Yes, I think so.”

  Matt didn’t blame her for it. He had one too after that disastrous run, and without the Doc and his parents pulling him back from the brink he likely would have become a recluse like Ulysses. Meanwhile, Maggie had no safe space to retreat to. Her only friends had been their Crawler group and her own brother, who had also left.

  He had to find a way to reason with Maggie before she made a terrible mistake.

  “Can’t you barricade the doors?” he asked Mr. Chang. “I dunno, add another wall of concrete on top of the others? Maybe a blast door or two?”

  “I’ve sealed the entrances, but no barrier will keep out a determined Crawler forever,” Mr. Chang replied, his jaw clenching. “I often check that Dungeon in case anybody manages to wander inside.”

  Matt shifted on his seat. “And what did you see?”

  “Nothing. The whole place is eerily quiet and devoid of monsters… but I could feel that thing observing me from afar at all times.” Mr. Chang took a deep breath. “I think it’s waiting for you.”

  A shiver traveled down Matt’s spine. Just the thought of that… that monster lurking patiently in those hallways to finish the job it couldn’t complete four years ago chilled him to his core. Could it even understand the concept of patience? Did it know that Perse’s teammates would inevitably try to take another shot at it?

  Those were questions Matthew didn’t want the answer to.

  “I…” He cleared his throat. “I’ll visit her tomorrow.”

  It was something he had been avoiding for years, ever since their falling out, but he couldn’t delay it forever. Especially since from what John told him, Maggie was also on thin ice when it came to school. Maybe drawing her back into meaningless school drama would distract her from her plan.

  Who was he kidding? He had never seen Maggie change her mind about anything. She was more stubborn than a mule.

  “It would be wise,” Mr. Chang said after finishing his non-alcoholic drink. “You should pass home someday as well. My offer for a tutoring job for Kim still stands. I don’t want to involve her too much in what we do, but it’s best that she learns self-defense. I’m a manager first and a parent second.”

  “Kim’s a Blue,” Matt pointed out. He wasn’t one to spit on free money, and he liked Kim, but he knew he was far from the best person for the job. “She’s as far as she can be from me on the magic wheel without being a Violet. Kari would teach her better.”

  “I have asked Matsumoto first,” Mr. Chang said with a shrug. Matt didn’t blame him for asking the most reliable person first. “She politely denied me since she and Kim don’t get along.”

  Well, of course they didn’t, Kim had a wonderful personality. The explosive kind.

  Matt promised he would think about the proposal and then rejoined the rest of his allies. Everybody had taken their pick of weapons, and John and Kari were now busy showing their new recruits how to use Crawlnet.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “And that’s the application where you can set up patrol routes,” Kari explained as she pointed at spots on her laptop. “The system brings up any potential Dungeon’s location or suspect police reports.”

  “It’s quite the expansive database,” Sasha said as she began to browse the site. Matthew peeked over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of the wiki page detailing Dungeons. “It’ll take us days to review everything.”

  That was one way to put it. Crawlnet had grown so large over the last year that Crypto had to design an in-house AI to take care of moderator duties. The website included a Dungeon-themed wiki, a GPS-linked alert system for its members to warn them of danger, a spell research archive, a message board with private message functionalities, a chatroom, and tons of other functions. The entire crawler community’s pool of knowledge had metastasized there.

  “And anybody can participate on the site?” Petro asked in disbelief. “Isn’t that a bit dangerous?”

  “Crypto must confirm a member to be a Crawler before they’re allowed to edit and post pages, but it’s in open access otherwise,” Kari confirmed. “Most people write the content off as a collaborative writing project site due to Disbelief, but Dungeon survivors usually search for information on what happened to them on the net before anything else.”

  “So they find their way to the site, recognize the information as legit, and reach out?” Sasha guessed while stroking her chin. “That’s smart. What I don’t get is why your pages have so much info on how Dungeons act and how to deal with them, but nothing on their history.”

  “That’s because nobody’s sure what they are,” John replied. “The most popular theories are that they’re either a species of interdimensional predators which has found its way to Earth somehow, or a kind of reality cancer. The current consensus is that Disbelief is some sort of collective immune system to keep them out.”

  “Some think the timeshifts slowly weaken Disbelief over time, and that Dungeons will be able to manifest directly into reality if it falls completely,” Kari said grimly. “That’s why we cull them quickly before they grow too large.”

  John eyed the newcomers with a steely gaze. “If you have any sense of duty, you’ll join us.”

  “John, stop pressuring them,” Kari chided him, while Amélia, Sasha, and Petro exchanged uneasy glances. “They have a lot on their plate right now.”

  Realizing he should lighten the mood before John managed to sink it further, Matthew tried to look for a good conversation opener and quickly found one. “Are you an orphan, Petro?”

  A short silence followed, which was first broken by the sound of Kari’s hand hitting her forehead and then Petro’s response. “How could you tell?”

  “You look like one of the Robins,” Matthew explained. It was a lie, he was just throwing stuff at a wall and hoped it stuck. “You know, from Batman? Broody teenager with a dark, mysterious past?”

  Petro looked at him. “Who’s Batman?”

  The question hung in the air for a while, with Matthew praying it wasn’t as bad as it sounded. “Multibillionaire who lost his parents and became a masked vigilante?” he asked, pleading for a miracle. “Bruce Wayne?”

  “Oh, you mean Owlman?” Petro nodded in recognition, destroying what little hope Matthew had left. “I love those movies, but I don’t think I look like Henry Cavill.”

  Matthew took a deep breath and began to mourn. He knew that day was bound to come sooner or later.

  Timeshifts had killed Batman.

  “Good try anyway,” Petro replied with a small smile. “You can’t miss with orphan jokes, we were never wanted in the first place.”

  John sent him the strangest of looks. “You’re fine joking about that?”

  “I’m over it,” Petro replied with a shrug. “I like black comedy.”

  Charlie, who had been listening from afar, leaned in to add his two cents. “Do people get receipts when they adopt orphans? Can parents bring the child back if they’re not happy with the product?”

  “No they don’t,” John replied with some coldness.

  “Oh my god, can we change the subject?” Kari complained. Thankfully, she was enough of a smooth talker to find one. “So Petro, where do you come from? Your accent reminds me of Mr. Kresnik.”

  “I’m from Yugoslavia,” Petro replied, which reminded Matt that the country hadn’t broken up since two or three Timeshifts ago. “I’m a… refugee, you could say.”

  “My dad took him in,” Sasha added. “Petro has been with us for over a year since.”

  Matt had the ugly feeling that Petro’s affinity with weapons had something to do with his refugee status, but a quick glance from Kari convinced him to drop the matter. She took the lead from there and offered the newcomers to hang out with them after class, which they accepted.

  Matt did notice that Amélia hadn’t spoken a word in a while. She sat in a corner, listening in silence without participating. As a fellow introvert, Matt knew she wouldn’t open up unless spoken to first.

  Matt figured now was as good a time as any.

  “Something has been bugging me for a while,” Matt whispered into her ear as he sat next to her in an attempt to open the conversation, his gaze turned to Petro and Sasha. “Why were you stalking those two?”

  Amélia flinched. “I… I wasn’t stalking them,” she protested with a hushed tone, which implied that yes, she was.

  “Petro said you sneaked into the church,” Matt whispered back. “And I’ve seen the way you look at them.”

  “I wasn’t…” Amélia gulped. “I, uh… I’d seen them together before, so I thought… I could catch them in the act.”

  Matt squinted. He was starting to see where this was leading. “You wanted to break them up?”

  “No, I…” Amélia bit her lower lip. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, it sounds like it does.”

  “It’s just…” Amélia blushed. “Promise me you won’t mock me.”

  Matthew crossed his fingers. “I pinky-swear.”

  “I hoped to…” Amélia gathered her breath, and then confessed her most heinous sin. “To watch.”

  Oh.

  Oh!

  Oh, she was one of those! That explained a lot…

  Amélia blushed in shame. “You’re not disgusted?”

  “You do you.” Matt shrugged. “I’ve read erotic manga.”

  Amélia’s head perked up. “Like Cuckolded in Another World?”

  A guilty silence followed, which Matt broke with a tentative question of his own. “Reincarnated as a bottom?”

  “Read that one too.” Amélia smiled in embarrassment. “Re:Harem?”

  Incredible… Timeshifts erased Batman, but not those quality pieces of literature. Erotica will never die!

  “No way, I thought I was the only one to…” Matt looked over his shoulder to ensure nobody else would judge him, then conspired with Amélia. “I keep telling John that the plot is great, but he looks at me in disgust whenever I recommend it.”

  “I know, right?” Amélia studied him from head to toe. She finally identified for what he was: a fellow manga degenerate. “You’re our class’ cyclops, right? I think I’ve… that I’ve seen you.”

  “No, I’m just Matt.” Were people really calling him that behind his back? So mean. “So, what’s your Key anyway?”

  “I’m… I’m not really sure myself. Everything is… everything is so new.” She joined her twitching fingers in embarrassment. “I hoped that… that someone could help me figure it out.”

  “Well, say no more,” Matt said with a hand on his chest. How could he deny a fellow connoisseur in need of enlightened guidance? “Your new senpai will help you through this new period of your life!”

  “Really?” For once, Amélia’s small smile appeared genuine. “I… I’d appreciate it.”

  Matt had the feeling he had made a new friend.

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