They walked along the narrow parapet in silence.

  The stairs had led them to a path along the first floor offering a haunting view of the courtyard and the deep fryer moats surrounding the Major Chicken castle. Kari walked ahead of the trio, her sharp gaze noticing tiny hints of the Old Town Team’s journey across the Dungeon.

  Matthew himself was more worried about the cobwebs. He had noticed a few in various corners and quickly gathered that they were built from magnetic tape rather than silk strands. Their black and silver surfaces contrasted neatly with the crimson cobblestones forming the bulk of the Dungeon’s architecture.

  They looked utterly out of place.

  “It can’t be that,” John argued with confidence, his hands gripping his gun. “Monsters can’t leave Dungeons, especially a destroyed one.”

  Matthew remained dubious. “Dungeons aren’t supposed to play nice with their victims either. There are anomalies everywhere, Johnny Boy.”

  “Monsters can’t survive long without constant Flux exposure, Maruki,” John insisted. “We’ve tried, remember? Every monster we took out of a Dungeon for studies perished almost immediately. Besides, if it came from the spider nest at the school, then you’ve already destroyed its core.”

  That was technically true… Matthew absorbed the school Dungeon’s core into his black hole eye, from which nothing ever escaped. Even he couldn’t recover anything drawn into its singularity. And even if the core survived that experience, it collapsed its Dungeon in short order and slew all its monstrous inhabitants.

  Why did he have such a bad feeling then? Matthew had come to trust his gut, and right now it told him that all his assumptions were somehow wrong.

  “We do not know enough yet,” Crypto replied through the navigators. “Do you see any trace of the Old Town team?”

  “I’m following their footsteps,” Kari replied upon reaching a small side entrance leading inside. The door was closed, yet unlocked. “Is your Doom Sense still picking something up, Matthew?”

  “Nope,” Matthew replied, though he had the feeling this respite wouldn’t last.

  Kari nodded in apprehension, and then opened the door. A wide and twisting hallway with several staircases leading elsewhere into the giant restaurant stretched before them. The trio walked past numerous doors on one side and windows on the other. Portraits of the Major Chicken cartoon’s main cast—from Major Chicken himself to Private Tenders—adorned the wall. The smell of frying oil was gone, replaced with that of sanitized products.

  Kari froze in front of one of the doors and stared at the ground suddenly, her face paling in dread. Matthew dared peek over her shoulder to see what bothered her.

  Dry blood.

  A thin trace of red, dry human blood leaked beneath a door.

  The team wordlessly exchanged glances, with Matthew taking the lead. His Doom Sense started picking up again like a needle pressing against the back of his skull. He gave his allies a rudimentary hand sign to warn them of danger.

  Then he blew the door open.

  His power turned it and a good chunk of the wall into a hole large enough for the three of them to walk through. Matthew and John both raised their hands, the former with finger-guns and the latter with actual ones ready to shoot. A quiet and ominous hall welcomed them, alongside a most ominous sight.

  The vast room seemed to have been a mix between a private VIP lounge and a lord’s solar once, with a large inactive fireplace at the center filled with cold ashes and facing a long lord’s table. A landscape window offered a good view of the fake wasteland surrounding the castle.

  However, the room had been savaged. Many chairs lay overturned; dark stains marred the otherwise pristine floor alongside claw marks; and Matthew noticed traces of explosions next to a partly shattered window. The Dungeon’s orange particles swirled around those spots to clean the damage.

  “They fought here.” Kari bit her lower lip. “The Old Town team.”

  And they’d lost.

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  This thought grew into certainty the more Matthew and his teammates studied the room. Kari examined the dark stains—which were clearly dry human blood—with her Key, John checked the windows, and Matthew’s eye lingered on the ceiling. He noticed another magnetic tape web in the upper left corner intertwined with a surveillance camera. The machine had been pulled off from the wall and kept tightly entrapped as if it were a bug caught by a spider, but its black lens gave Matthew goosebumps. He couldn’t shrug off the awful sensation of being watched.

  His Doom Sense did not relent either. There was a secret danger lurking around, a trap that he couldn’t see.

  “There’s blood on that window,” John warned them. He pointed at cracks in the glass with his gun. “There.”

  Kari’s deep breath echoed across the floor. “Blight was killed first.”

  Her words resonated in the air like a curse; the final nail in a coffin. Kari’s Premium Thought spell combined with supernatural visual acuity let her reconstruct the scene in her mind.

  “She… she saw something, there.” Kari pointed at the broken dais roughly three meters to her left. “Probably a monster, which she tried to attack… I think it struck her chest with enough force to cave it in. She fell where I stand right now, and…” She exhaled to calm her nerves. “She… she didn’t get back up.”

  A chill traveled down Matthew’s spine. His crew hadn’t noticed the Major Chicken entrance in Temple Alley back when they did their first reconnaissance with the Doc. He thought they’d simply overlooked that area, but now he realized that this entrance had opened up recently… and whose deaths helped the Dungeon fuel its manifestation.

  “Then Bomberman threw a grenade at their attacker to fend it off,” Kari said. “The monster dodged and moved next to the window. Authority tried to use her Key to immobilize it long enough for Bomberman to blow it up. She… she failed.” She stared at the cracked window with empty eyes. “The monster grabbed Bomberman and… and smashed his skull against the glass, then against the floor.”

  None of them dared to speak up, and Crypto had gone silent on her end of the line.

  “Authority…” Kari turned at the hall’s entrance and the dark stains at the threshold. “She tried to run for the door. She’d opened it halfway when the monster struck her in the back.”

  Crypto emerged from her torpor. “Do you see the bodies?”

  “No.” Kari pointed her rapier at dark stains leading up to a doorway across the other end of the hall. “The monster dragged them away one after the other to another room.”

  “The monster,” John repeated, his eyes squinting in skepticism. “You said there was only one assailant?”

  “Yes.” Kari’s nod felt heavier than stone. “A monster with claw tufts at the end of its legs.”

  Like a spider, Matthew thought. His Doom Sense’s alarm rang louder and louder in his head. He tried to focus on its source and gazed at the magnetic tape web, searching for danger–

  No, Matthew thought upon looking away. Nothing to see there. Nothing important. Nothing… nothing to see…

  “That’s unusual,” Crypto’s voice rang in his ear in the background of a terrible headache. “Monsters always consume corpses on the spot. Why move them?”

  There was… nothing, nothing to see there, a simple web with a mere camera caught in its magnetic strands. Nothing to see.

  “No, I want to look,” Matthew grunted through his teeth as he forced his head not to turn away. He sensed an invisible pressure that struggled back against him, like two hands fighting over a driving wheel.

  “Maruki?” he heard John call him. “What’s going on?”

  “There…” he blurted through the sharp pain in his skull. “The web… messing with my head… something I can’t see.”

  Something was there, something which his mind refused to focus on. He sensed foreign thoughts worm their way into his mind, telling him to look away from the web, that there was nothing worth seeing there, that he shouldn’t pay attention, but he forced himself to stare at it with all of his will until he pushed the thing out–

  The illusion snapped away and Matthew found himself face-to-face with the creature.

  It looked down upon the Crawlers from above, its spindly metal appendages gripping the magnetic tape web supporting its monstrous biomechanical body. Four of its black mechanical limbs angled outward from its shoulders in a wide, menacing stance. Its central, humanoid body was partly covered in bone plates meshed with purple circuit-flesh and sleek metal, while its arms and legs ended in clawed hands and feet.

  It was its black, skull-like visage which disturbed Matthew the most, however, from its all-too-human jaw, its lipless teeth, to its two blue camera eyes whirring as they observed him. They flickered with a light he had only seen a handful of times in those mindless creatures.

  “You,” the monster growled in gargled English with a voice more akin to a scratched record than anything a human could produce. “See… I.”

  A flicker of sentience.

  Matthew raised his finger-gun and shot it in the head.

  The monster shifted its position at the last moment, a hole forming in its shoulder rather than in the middle of its face. It let out a soul-rending shriek that freed John and Kari from whatever mental effect prevented them from noticing its presence. The former quickly opened fire at the spider, who leaped across the room to another wall while shielding its body from bullets with its metal legs.

  “What’s going on?!” Crypto asked through the navigators.

  “It’s one of those tarantulas from the school!” Matthew shouted while aiming for the creature. “It can mess with our brains!”

  The monster’s head snapped in his direction, its eyes whirring like cylinders.

  “Tarantulas?” it asked.

  A shiver ran down Matthew’s spine. That was a question. Not words parroted by a creature unable to understand them, not an attempt to destabilize, but a genuine inquiry.

  “It… it is I. Tarantulas is… I?” the monster gargled as it quickly gained a grasp on the human language, and through it, the very concept of selfhood. “I am Tarantulas.”

  This thing could think.

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