A hail of golden spears bounced off the Doc’s barrier.

  Matthew landed on the ground first, and his teammates followed soon after. A multi-layered defense of woven Flux quickly shielded the team from the onslaught of projectiles thrown at them. A hundred javelins crashed against their defensive perimeter in a futile attempt to pierce it, only to shatter on impact.

  The Doc’s previous hypothesis turned out to be correct. The second layer was a stillborn realm built over the remains of an assimilated Dungeon; a seemingly endless floor of rotting brown wood engulfed in primal darkness. This level lacked both walls and a ceiling, or any source of light besides its core itself.

  The Dungeon’s heart floated above its final defender like a halo a hundred meters or so from the closing rift. Both were equally mismatched. The unstable core took the shape of a glowing golden sphere with a violet hole for a center, which slowly ground dots of green and orange Flux to nothing.

  As for the Boss, it grew from the wooden ground itself. Matthew might have mistaken it for an ancient oak tree at first glance, were it not for its six twisted branch wings of golden leaves and the many writhing eyes growing out of its blackened bark. The latter dripped with viscous sap on the monster’s twisted roots, which sucked the Flux from the floor dry.

  The Dungeon cannibalized its own resources in a last-ditch attempt to strengthen its final line of defense.

  And it wouldn’t be enough.

  “Rhinoceros formation!” the Doc shouted as he altered the shape of his barrier from a protective sphere to a thin sheet floating above the group. He quickly put his hand on John’s back, the student’s body soon radiating with a white glow. “Onward!”

  Matthew grinned ear to ear. The rhinoceros formation followed a very simple strategy: trampling everything ahead until it died.

  John touched his teammates and charged them with his own Flux. Matthew sensed a surge of energy empowering every inch of his body. It felt like lightning coursing through his veins.

  The Doc’s Key allowed him to temporarily tune up those of other Crawlers; to boost power, range, duration, control, or precision at the expense of the others. If Keys had stats, it would be akin to reallocating them, or transforming a sniper rifle into a gatling gun.

  When practicing the rhinoceros formation, he always began by maximizing John’s power at the expense of its precision. This allowed him to affect larger objects more easily.

  Like other humans, for example.

  Kari, as the formation’s horn, charged first with her rapier and a combat knife; Matthew and John, as the eyes, followed after to back her up with long-range attacks; and the Doc, as the hide, focused on shielding their sides.

  Matthew and John opened hostilities by targeting the core; the former with his finger guns, the latter with actual bullets. Unfortunately, the Dungeon had plenty of time to observe their tactics and reacted accordingly. The halo-core hastily hid behind the Boss, with Matthew’s holes manifesting on the monster’s thick bark hide and John’s bullets bursting one of its sapping eyes.

  The Boss’ roots wriggled and then erupted from the floor in an overwhelming tide of wood. Kari charged at it without fear or doubt. Her blades sang as her steel sliced and pierced through everything.

  When supercharged by the Doc’s power, John’s Key did more than simply redirect motion; it increased the momentum of objects it affected. Kari’s rapier struck at bullet speeds and her knife slashed ahead faster than untrained eyes could follow. This power boost, combined with her unnatural precision and the Peak spell’s physical enhancements, let her slice through the roots with casual ease. She quickly carved a bloody path for her teammates to follow, and the Doc secured it by raising barriers on each side of the group.

  The Boss’ roots suddenly retreated back to its trunk as the team closed in on its main body. Its six wings expanded and flapped with such strength that they whipped up a mighty gust of wind. The team would have likely been thrown backward without John’s boost, and even then it slowed down their advance long enough for the Boss to take flight.

  The monster hovered over the floor, its immense body floating with eldritch grace. Now that it had uprooted itself, Matthew would peg the creature as at least twelve meters tall and half as thick. Its eyes glowed with so much Violet Flux that a flow of purple particles soon enveloped the creature.

  The core’s malign intelligence knew that it had nowhere left to run or hide, having already spent the resources required to create a new floor or more monsters to protect itself. Its last hope of victory was to overwhelm the Crawlers with brute force and then absorb their Flux before they depleted its remaining reserves.

  So it threw everything it had behind its attack. Purple sheets of folded space materialized around the team in the form of a wide cube larger than a house. The very fabric of reality twisted within their confines as they enveloped the Crawlers in a shrinking prison.

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  Matthew immediately recalled the attack. The miniboss tried it against him earlier on a much smaller scale.

  “It’s folding space to crush us!” Kari warned.

  “Counterspell,” the Doc said, his hands slamming together and unleashing a wide pulse of White Flux. Matthew sensed it travel outward through him and then clash against the Boss’ technique. The purple cube rippled, its walls undulating and vibrating like glass put through intense frequencies.

  Then it shattered into a thousand pieces.

  Matthew had seen the Doc use that technique often enough to learn its flaws. First of all, Counterspell canceled the user’s other spells too; the Doc’s Key remained active, but his barriers collapsed back into white particles.

  Second, Counterspell expanded as much energy as the spell it was neutralizing. The Doc was precise enough to target the Boss’ spatiotemporal attack alone, but the experience left him sweating and panting with exhaustion.

  “Maruki!” John shouted. “You score this one!”

  “With pleasure!” Matthew replied with a grin.

  He jumped, and then he flew.

  Sacrificing his Key’s precision meant that John could only redirect him in simple straight lines: up, down, left, right. However, the power charge he imbued Matthew with propelled him through the air in an instant. The Boss, still reeling from its last-ditch attack, clumsily failed to intercept him with its roots.

  Matthew floated upward until he hovered above the creature. The core appeared to him, glowing and hiding behind the trunk.

  The perfect angle.

  The Doc likely settled on the rhinoceros formation because the rooted Boss would resist the pull of Matthew’s black hole and counterattack. Threatening it with a direct charge forced it to take flight to escape, and thus made it vulnerable.

  Powering through his vertigo, Matthew began to remove his eyepatch. He would suck out the core in an instant at best, or force the Boss to focus on him and leave itself open to his allies’ attack at worst.

  “Sss…”

  A rustling, droning noise resonated out of the creature’s leaf-wings. One of its roots slashed the very fabric of reality and engulfed itself inside a thin violet rift in spacetime.

  “Sss…” the monster growled, though it had no mouth to utter sounds with. “Ssst… oooo… p…”

  The Boss was forming a word.

  Like… like that thing….

  Matthew froze in midair, the horrible memory of the creature intruding upon his thoughts. He remembered it saying his name, speaking to him when it opened its mouth to–

  “Maruki!” John snarled in anger, his gun helplessly firing at the Boss’s roots. “Do it!”

  Matthew shook off the traumatizing memory and began to pull off his eyepatch, but he had wasted too much time. The root pulled up a screaming girl through the rift and then moved her between Matthew and the core.

  Sasha. It had caught Sasha.

  Either Maggie hadn’t exited the first floor yet or she had failed to secure the entrance.

  “Stoooop…” the Boss droned through its rustling leaves, its root threateningly dangling Sasha at Matthew as if she were a protective talisman. It squeezed the poor girl so hard that her lungs soon lacked air to scream with. “Stooop…”

  Matthew ground his teeth in frustration and put his eyepatch back on. He couldn’t open his black hole without endangering Sasha.

  They had made a terrible mistake. Evacuating the civilians taught the Dungeon that the team prioritized protecting them over destroying its core. It likely didn’t understand why, since its malevolent kind had no concept of altruism, but it didn’t care so long as it worked.

  The Dungeon had learned the concept of taking a hostage.

  “Your girlfriend fucked up, Maruki!” John snarled in anger on the ground. “Cut the root, Matsumoto! I’ll lift you up!”

  “Not yet!” the Doc protested, his body clothed in white light. “At this height, the fall will kill this girl!”

  Unable to use his black hole and with John’s fading power struggling to keep him afloat, Matthew attempted to strike the core with his more precise finger guns. The Boss deftly moved its hostage in his line of fire before he could actually attack. Worst of all, floating golden javelins began to materialize around the creature. The Boss barely managed to create a dozen due to its fading Flux reserves, but they remained sharp and dangerous.

  Matthew instinctively raised his arms to protect himself, when a loud boom echoed across the room. Only when he glanced at its source did he realize that the rift hadn’t closed. In fact, it had begun to widen once more.

  The Dungeon had grown so weak that it couldn’t close its main entrance anymore… nor prevent intruders from forcing their way in.

  Maggie fell through the rift with stone flesh and cement skin.

  She hit the Boss straight in the middle of its trunk with the weight and strength of an artillery strike. The impact caused the monster’s body to crack and snap, its half-formed javelins collapsing into sorcerous particles.

  “Now!” the Doc ordered while slamming his hands.

  “Lift me up!” Kari ordered John. She surged upward like a missile as her teammate’s power fueled her ascent, her blade cutting the root holding Sasha without harming her. Both girls fell down alongside a rain of sliced wood.

  Matthew’s path was clear, and he seized his chance.

  Unwilling to use his black hole with so many people so close to him, he instead bombarded the exposed core with his finger guns. Holes quickly riddled its crystalline surface. Flux of multiple colors leaked through them and the entire Dungeon began to shake. It had wasted too much of its energy to properly stabilize.

  The Doc chose this moment to act. Calling upon his last remaining reserves, he manifested a half-made barrier in a spiraling shape right under his charges. Kari, Matthew, and Sasha slid down on it with the angle slowing down their fall. The impact at the bottom was rough and left them riddled with bruises, but it beat being splattered on the floor.

  The core shattered in a searing flash of golden light, and the Dungeon perished with a final shriek.

  A wave of Flux rippled through reality and hit Matthew in the face. It propelled him back through the Dungeon’s layers of wood, through shifting dimensions, through the very fabric of space and time. He finished his dramatic exit on a dirt floor with his head squarely hitting someone’s butt.

  “Ugh…” He heard Kari complain not too far away from himself. “I’m never getting used to this…”

  Matthew forced himself to sit up and allowed himself to sigh in relief when he realized that they had all landed on the church’s threshold. Parishioners sent them strange glances, but he didn’t care. The Boss was gone, and the nightmarish dimension it protected along with it.

  Everyone made out of the Dungeon alive.

  They’d even managed to save Sasha, though she appeared clearly shaken by her experience. Her b-friend Petro was helping her stand up. Maggie lurked nearby, her skin now returned to normal. She gave Matthew a strange look, then turned and walked away without a word.

  The mission was a success, but Matthew could already tell that the cleanup would be messy.

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