Of course they had guns!

  Matthew should have seen it coming. The fast-food chain was named Major Chicken for God’s sake, and the cartoon was full of heavily buff army poultry killing veggie monsters with heavy firepower.

  The good news was that robot chickens made for lousy shots, so Matthew and Kari managed to duck behind one booth while John hid behind another. The monsters fired their weapons like maniacal monkeys on cocaine, blasting out the windows and front door, and tearing apart chair cushions. It didn’t take long for the restaurant to turn into a warzone.

  “John, gimme something!” Kari shouted, with John tossing her a Glock from across the room. The hailstorm of lead slowed down as their enemies eventually ran out of ammo. “One, two, three!”

  Matthew and his allies rose from behind their cover to return fire… or at least he tried until his Doom Sense buzzed like never before. He barely managed to shoot a waiter with his finger gun until he was forced to hide again from another volley.

  Moreover, the monsters’ rate of fire sharply increased in his direction. Matthew had to crawl on the floor as bullets riddled his booth-cover with holes. His hiding hole had turned into Swiss cheese.

  The entire monster army was targeting him specifically.

  “I think they hate you, Matthew,” Kari noted in between shots. The monsters barely paid attention to her and John, which let them return fire freely with lethal accuracy.

  “Why, because I was a colonel in their army and defected to the opposition?!” Matthew complained. He tried to peek over his cover, and caught a glimpse of John sending a mechanical duck stumbling into the kitchen doors with a bullet to the head before he was forced to hide again from incoming projectiles. “You can’t betray anybody these days!”

  And he wasn’t even a vegetarian! Why so much hate?!

  With no way forward, Matthew crawled to the nearest wall and made a small hole in it. He managed to make his way to the kitchen unseen, then observed a flow of shotgun-wielding goblinoid chiefs and armed animatronics running towards the restaurant to reinforce their allies.

  Matthew slipped behind a prep-station and hit the floor with his hand. A gaping pit materialized across the kitchen floor, swallowing monsters, grills, and equipment alike. The creatures fell into the darkness with snarls and clucks.

  “Enjoy the climb back up,” Matthew taunted them. “Or not!”

  He closed the hole in an instant, crushing all the monsters caught inside.

  The restaurant firefight calmed down and then ended with John blasting the last animatronic through the kitchen doors. With the battle won, he and Kari quickly regrouped with Matthew.

  “Okay, Maruki, you go first,” John said.

  “What?” Matthew glared at him. “Why?!”

  “Because you’ll draw the enemy’s fire away from the rest of us, and it’s nice to focus on offense without worrying about my own safety for once.”

  “Hey, I didn’t sign on to become a dodge tank!” Matthew complained. He had never played a rogue in his life, and he wasn’t about to start now. “Go find another suicidal lead!”

  “I’m sorry, Matthew, but I agree with John on this one,” Kari said. “Not because I want to use you as a human shield, but because if the enemy is prioritizing taking you out, then having you in the back will encourage ambushes and pincer maneuvers. Directing monsters to the vanguard increases our overall chances of surviving the Dungeon.”

  Matthew clenched his jaw in frustration, but he couldn’t deny Kari’s point. Using his Colonel VIP privilege and then ‘betraying’ the Dungeon’s trust had earned him the latter’s ire. Having him stay in the back would cause monsters to either trample his allies or attack from all sides to better strike at him, while moving to the front would draw enemy fire and allow his teammates to focus on covering him.

  “Okay, fine, but I’m choosing the path we take according to my Doom Sense,” Matthew conceded. “I’m not playing a Duck Hunt game where I’m the duck.”

  John shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  “We should check Tarantulas’ room first,” Kari suggested. “We should recover the Old Town Team’s remains… if they’re still there.”

  “Sure.” Matthew gathered his breath, checked his spells, and then created a portal to the entrance for later in case they had to retreat for any reason. “Now follow me, peons. I’m the president, and you’re my bodyguards. Don’t screw up like the USA Secret Service.”

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  “That shouldn’t be too hard,” John joked back. “They only lost… four presidents?”

  “Six,” Kari corrected him. “Both Bushes got shot two timeshifts ago.”

  Matthew took that as a bad sign, and so did his Doom Sense.

  His spell buzzed in the back of his head when the trio walked up to the courtyard after locking down the pantry rooms to avoid being cornered by angry living condiments. Matthew nearly took a bullet to the head the moment he stepped outside and had to hastily retreat.

  “They have snipers in their watchtowers!” he warned his allies once back inside.

  Kari stepped outside, raised her gun, and fired two shots. Matthew saw two animatronics fall into the courtyard with a thump. His friend then dramatically snuffed the steam coming off the barrel.

  “How did I look?” Kari asked her teammates with a big wide smile. “Cool?”

  “Like an NRA ad,” John replied bluntly. “And not the inspired ones.”

  “I’m starting to see the appeal of firearms,” Matthew admitted. There was something fiercely attractive about a woman gunning down extradimensional monsters without prejudice. “Can you do that again, Kari?”

  She winked back at him. “I’ll do my best.”

  Unfortunately for her–and fortunately for Matthew–it seemed the Dungeon had sent most monsters on the ground floor to greet them at the entrance, so they encountered little opposition after the courtyard. The trio soon walked up to the room where they confronted Tarantulas yesterday.

  The group tensed up upon entering the area. They found it in the state in which they left it, though the Dungeon had partly repaired the window which the monster broke on its way out. Matthew searched around for traps and found none.

  “It dragged the Old Town’s team through this door,” Kari guessed upon pointing at the only other exit.

  “This path must lead to the creature’s nest,” John noted. “Is your Doom Sense picking up on anything, Maruki?”

  “Nope,” he replied. This area was entirely safe as far as his protection spell was concerned. “I don’t think it left a spawn or trap behind.”

  “Makes sense, since it left in a hurry.” John quickly reloaded his weapons, just in case. “But let’s not lower our guard.”

  Matthew nodded and opened the door. An ominous dark corridor lit up with gaslight torches and infested with magnetic tape cobwebs opened up in front of him. He and the others walked its entire length without a word, the sound of their footsteps the only source of noise, until they reached its end.

  They stepped into the surveillance room.

  Or at least, Matthew suspected it used to serve this purpose for the Dungeon until Tarantulas turned it into its nest. The chamber was large and devoid of windows, with most of its walls and ceiling covered in a thick tangle of magnetic tape spider strands holding screen monitors up in the air. This infernal contraption linked up with computers and cables which Matthew assumed led to the cameras overseeing the rest of the Dungeon.

  Three cocoons wrapped up in wires along the left wall caught Matthew’s attention. He already knew what they contained, even before he spotted a pale hand sticking out of one.

  They had found the Old Town’s team.

  “Rest in peace,” Matthew muttered under his breath. Kari joined her hands and offered a Buddhist prayer for the three.

  Even John marked a minute of silence before grabbing his navigator. “I’ll call Crypto and see if she can arrange a pick-up for them.”

  “Yes,” Kari agreed, her voice heavy with sorrow. “They deserved better.”

  Matthew nodded without answering. His gaze lingered on the three cocoons for a while. He was afraid of opening them; he knew he would see Perse’s face instead of the Old Town team’s should he try.

  Why did Tarantulas preserve the corpses? Monsters took no nourishment from flesh—whatever Dungeons harvested from people to sustain themselves had no physical manifestation—so it wouldn’t have stored them for future consumption. Did it keep them as trophies, or for some other purpose?

  “They don’t oversee the Dungeon,” Kari said behind him.

  Her words startled Matthew out of his thoughts. He peeked over his shoulder. “What?”

  “Look at the monitors.” Kari pointed at the screens. All of them showed empty Major Chicken restaurants and their drive-throughs. “They’re recording the outside world.”

  A chill traveled down Matthew’s spine as he checked the screens. Kari was right. The monitors showed video footage from the three Evermarsh restaurants outside the Dungeon; he could even spot the date and hour of recording.

  “Does this place connect to the cameras outside?” Matthew asked in utter disbelief. He doubted that would be the case, since creating navigators capable of interacting with the outside world alone had taken the Association a lot of time, but Dungeons never conformed to the rules of reality.

  “Not that I can tell,” Kari replied. He trusted her opinion as a Blue Crawler, since she had a better intuitive grasp of these devices than he did. “I think… I think Tarantulas probably went outside to steal surveillance camera footage and then review them here.”

  John frowned at the implications. “It was looking for more victims.”

  “Maybe…” Kari checked the computers connecting to the monitors. “I’ll see if I can recover the footage for later. It could give us a clue to its whereabouts.”

  Matthew checked the footage’s dates. One of them listed the time as Saturday, so right after Tarantulas escaped the school Dungeon. That monster had been studying humans for days, observing them from afar.

  Something clicked in Matthew’s mind. He recalled the moment he found himself face to face with Tarantulas and realized he had missed a very important detail.

  “Kari.” Matthew cleared his throat. “When you reconstituted the Old Town team’s death, you said Tarantulas attacked them after being spotted?”

  “Yes, or at least evidence pointed that way.” Kari squinted at him. “Why the question?”

  “Because Tarantulas didn’t attack us until after I spotted it,” Matthew replied. “I struck it first, and so did Bomberman’s team.”

  Tarantulas only attacked both Crawler teams after they’d noticed it, and otherwise stuck to observation. The monster had a marked preference towards remaining unnoticed over attacking immediately, much like an intelligent predator would act cautiously when faced with an unknown potential prey. It had even spent most of its time during his clash with Matthew’s crew asking them questions, as if to assess them.

  Tarantulas didn’t gather this footage to help find more victims, but to study humans.

  To study the enemy.

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