Her name echoed in his head like a curse.

  He hadn't said it in years, though he never forgot it either. It had haunted his steps for the past four years each time he caught a whiff of a Dungeon, and brought itself back to his attention whenever he and his teammates encountered danger. The mere mention of it gave him a skull-splitting headache.

  “You really want to go there, Maggie?” Matthew replied, his voice now frostier than a Russian winter. “Yes, we all failed her. There's not a day when I don't think about her.”

  “Do you?” Maggie scoffed. “Then why haven't you even visited her since?"

  Matthew clenched his jaw and looked away in guilt. Truth was, the mere sight of that church left him uneasy, let alone seeing Perse’s tomb. “I was too busy wrecking dungeons.”

  “Uhm…” Kari shifted in place. The conversation made her highly uncomfortable, but she was too polite to say it out loud. “Guys, I don’t think that now is the time–”

  “Yeah right,” Maggie ignored her while sneering at Matthew all the while. “Like you managed to wreck the Mall?”

  Matthew saw red, his blood boiling in his veins. She had crossed a line.

  “At least I tried to!” he snapped back in anger. It took a lot to infuriate him, but Maggie had willingly stepped on a landmine. “We would all have died in there without your brother and I! You didn’t even last a minute against the boss!”

  Maggie recoiled as if she had been slapped. “That was then,” she replied, albeit with less vehemence than before. “This is now.”

  “True that,” Matthew said with a snort. “Back then you had enough sense not to charge in alone against monsters too strong for you.”

  Maggie’s cheeks turned scarlet, her teeth grinding so tightly that Matthew thought that they would crack. “I didn’t need your help! I would have done fine on–”

  A sharp voice cut through the argument. “Enough!”

  Matthew winced. Kari Matsumoto never shouted in frustration.

  “I do not know what happened between you two, and I do not care!” she snapped at them with a tone that broke no disobedience. “We have four people lost across this Dungeon, two of them civilians in lethal danger! You can kill each other outside after we rescue them!”

  Maggie glared at her. “Who do you think you are, Ms. Student Council President?”

  “The mature one,” Kari replied with a cold scowl. She had taken an immediate dislike to Maggie. “Get with the program or leave. If you don’t need our help, others do. We won’t rescue you again.”

  The remark took the wind out of Maggie’s sails. Though she had clearly taken a turn for the worse since Matthew last met her, he knew she wasn’t a bad person at heart. She couldn’t ignore the threat to civilians’ lives.

  “I nearly reached the core, but it sank underground before I could get close enough to shatter it,” she mumbled under her breath. “Haven’t seen anyone since.”

  “The Dungeon must have used nearly all its Flux to manifest that last creature,” Matthew suggested. “It’s probably at its safest yet.”

  “We should stick to our first plan: regroup with the Doc and John, then look for the victims,” Kari decided. “The Dungeon created the new floor to protect its core, so I don’t think it teleported any other human there. Petro and the other abductee must be somewhere nearby.”

  Matthew sensed a new Pulse from their teammates erupting close to them; they must have sensed the monster’s summoning and worried for their safety. Matthew quickly released some Flux to signal their survival.

  The group then immediately moved to regroup with their allies. No other monster came to bother them. The Flux-starved Dungeon’s corridors were eerily quiet as they walked through a series of cells with rusty bars and spiky iron maidens for beds.

  Kari led the way, while Maggie stayed as far from Matthew as the Dungeon’s limited space would allow her to. Nobody spoke, though everyone often sent glances at each other—Kari to ensure that Maggie wouldn’t try anything, Matthew to check on his old and new teammates, and Maggie looked away every time he did. He could tell she felt a little guilty about their argument, but not enough to apologize yet.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  To think they used to be thick as thieves once… Perse would probably weep to see them like this.

  Matthew quickly banished the thought from his mind and focused on the present. Perse was dead and buried, alongside the friendship he’d once shared with his old team. There was nothing to be gained from dwelling on the past other than pain and regret.

  The air grew thick with the smell of blood the further they went in. It didn’t take them long to find the corpses of faceless angels on the ground. From their gunshot wounds and the neat cuts through their bodies—the telltale mark of the Doc’s barriers slicing through flesh—their teammates weren’t too far away.

  The trio eventually reached a beehive barrier of light closing off a corridor. The Doc’s handiwork.

  “Mr. O’Connor,” Kari announced their presence while knocking on the barrier. “We’re here!”

  The barrier immediately collapsed into a shower of White Flux particles, revealing a small hall backed by nine towering paintings of ghouls, twisted angels, a tentacled Jesus being strung up by fishlike humanoids, and other Dungeon-themed parodies of biblical events. Shining symbols etched on the floor provided a measure of light; Matthew recognized the Doc’s Encode spell, which imbued objects with spells meant to be triggered at a later date in a pinch. He must have warded this place to create a semi-safe hiding spot.

  Their mentor and teammate were there, tending to two strangers. The first was a young man in a black sweater hardly a year older than John, with black hair prematurely verging on gray. Matthew would peg him as having Slavic origins from the shape of his face, his haunted amber eyes staring at the newcomers with caution and alertness as his hands nervously fidgeted on the handle of a rifle.

  That boy had seen some tough shit.

  He still looked better than the other civilian, a teenager whose face felt vaguely familiar to Matt; except for the gashing wound extending across her face through the nose. She was slim and gaunt, with pale skin, platinum hair, and pale blue eyes. She clenched her skull with both hands while the Doc tended to her, her white shirt sprayed with blood. She was clearly in a state of shock.

  “Amélia?” Kari said in shock, seemingly recognizing the girl. She immediately rushed to examine her. “Are you wounded?”

  “She’s fine, Kari,” the Doc reassured as he finished putting a bandage on the girl’s facial wound. “Physically at least. She will need a safe place to gather her thoughts and recover.”

  Kari let out a sigh of relief, much to Matthew’s curiosity. “You know her, Kari?”

  “She’s in your class like Miss Amarie outside, and the other is the famous Petro,” John replied.

  "What, really?" Matthew squinted at Amélia. Now that he thought of it, he did remember seeing her face. He couldn't recall her ever speaking up in class though. She must have been the shy wallflower type.

  “Took you long enough to reach us, Maruki," John said. As usual, he didn’t bother with warm greetings. "I thought I’d advertised our position clearly enough.”

  “Don’t get cocky, Misfire,” Matthew replied. Though his teammate was an asshole, he was still relieved to find him alive and unharmed. “We cooked a mini-boss on our way there.”

  “You make it sound like an achievement.” John glanced at Maggie next, studying her with a cold, calculating gaze. “Ms. Powells, I presume?”

  Maggie glared back at him without a word. As Matthew suspected, his teammate’s aloofness rubbed her the wrong way.

  John raised an eyebrow at her, then turned to Matthew. “Is she mute or deaf?”

  “I can hear you, asshole.” Maggie crossed her arms and spat on the ground. “I thought the likes of you were too good for teams?”

  “Funny, I’ve heard the same thing about you,” John retorted with the same tone. “You charging in without a plan nor backup caused quite the stir.”

  “I can clear this place on my own,” Maggie replied. “I don’t need your self-help club’s assistance.”

  John stared at her for a while before glancing at Matthew. “I’m starting to see why you didn’t want to be around her, Maruki.”

  “The feeling is mutual,” Maggie replied, much to Matthew’s sorrow. At this point, he found it wise to keep his mouth shut rather than respond. Now was not the time for a reasonable conversation. She then glanced at the boy with the rifle. “You’re Petro, right? I’ve seen you at the church once or twice before.”

  The boy hesitated a moment, as if still unsure whether or not to trust them, then nodded slowly. He looked tense and clearly expected an attack of some kind. His first encounters with monsters must have been quite traumatizing.

  “You know how to use that rifle?” Maggie asked him brusquely. “More monsters might attack us soon.”

  “I’m out of ammo,” Petro confessed nervously. He shuddered as his eyes darted across the room. “What is this place anyway?”

  “We’ll explain outside,” Kari replied immediately, knowing very well that Disbelief would likely spare them an explanation. “How did you end up here?”

  “Because of her.” Petro pointed at Amélia. “I found her sneaking around the church last night. Thought she was a robber, so I grabbed Reverend Amarie’s gun. Next thing I knew, we were in this… this temple.”

  “I’m glad to see you both alive,” Kari said with a smile of relief. “We arrived in time.”

  Petro put on a better show than Matthew expected for a civilian. Most people who entered a Dungeon as aggressive as this one hardly lasted more than an hour. Either the young man had the natural instincts to last until morning, or…

  Matthew activated his Flux Sight spell and took a good look at Petro and Amélia. He immediately noticed a familiar glow hovering over them. A faint whiff of Orange for the former, and a dash of Green for the latter.

  He was sure of it now.

  These two had Keys.

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