“Advice on a date?” King Coach nearly choked on his toothbrush. Matthew had waited until most of the men’s bathroom was empty before cornering him. “You’ve got a date, Maruki?”

  “I was set up, I swear!” Matthew replied. Kari, true to her word, had booked him a date with Marlene at lunchtime with no way out of it. “Got any advice, coach? Some wise words to pump me up for battle?”

  King Coach sighed, set his toothbrush aside, and then put his hands on Matthew’s shoulders to prevent him from running away from a very harsh truth.

  “Look, Matthew, what you must remember is that this girl, whoever she is, is way out of your league; and if she doesn’t know it yet, then she will realize it soon,” he said very calmly. “All you need to remember is that nothing—nothing—you can ever say or do will ever change that.”

  “That’s…” Matthew squinted at his gym teacher. “Not pumping me up at all.”

  “It should, because it means you shouldn’t overthink it,” King Coach replied. “I told you, nothing you can do will change the outcome; so just be yourself and enjoy the moment before she realizes her mistake. Go with the flow.”

  That… Matthew supposed it did make some sort of sense. “Did that advice ever work for you?”

  “Yeah, it worked for me. Less so for the other party, but that’s life.” King Coach gave Matthew a pat on the back. “Forget you’re already doomed and embrace the guillotine, like the French.”

  He left afterward, his wisdom slowly sinking into Matthew’s heart.

  “I should probably have asked Petro for advice instead,” he told John as they made their way to the cafeteria for breakfast. “He’s the only boy in my social circle with an actual girlfriend.”

  “I’m afraid you lack his wounded brooding boy charm,” John replied with a shrug. “Besides, you should focus less on girls and more on surviving on our new Dungeon expedition.”

  “I am focusing on that!” Matthew protested. “I’ve found the perfect spell idea to bypass it. I just need a few days to refine it.”

  “Which certainly won’t blow up in your face,” John said upon catching Kari waiting for them at a table. “I’ll stick with my new deminer’s kit, thanks.”

  “Chicken.” Matthew’s heart sank when he saw Kari grinning at him with a pile of documents in hand. That wasn’t a good sign. “What’s that? Homework?”

  “Yes, yours!” Kari presented him with a clear yet terribly dense series of quizzes and diagrams. “Here’s a flowchart for all of your date’s possible responses. I’ve run the data through all possibilities and summarized the results in a thirty-page document. It’s very easy and intuitive, you’ll see.”

  “If you think he’ll remember even a tenth of that, Matsumoto, then your Premium Thought spell has gone haywire,” John said with a scoff. “You must be truly desperate not to go with him to the Fall Formal.”

  “Well…” Kari scratched her cheek. “Daniel asked me out on a lunch date today.”

  “Daniel? One of the twins?” Matthew grinned ear to ear. “That’s great! If you land him, you get his sister as an extra!”

  Kari blushed, but couldn’t suppress her laughter. “That’s mean, Matthew,” she said in between fits. “I know those two are close, but that’s so dirty…”

  “I’ll make a safe wager and bet that none of your dates will go well,” John replied before putting his hand on the table. “Can we please address the Dungeon in the room?”

  “Right.” Kari cleared her throat. “I’ve developed a more advanced version of the Psychometry spell. It should let us detect more traps if we combine it with Matthew’s Doom Sense and Articat scout. The Dungeon’s layout shouldn’t change since it lacks a Violet color, so we can map it out one room at a time.”

  “Mapping the Dungeon won’t be enough,” John warned them. “Tarantulas turned it into its nest. We took it by surprise the last time, but he will be both expecting us and be enjoying a home-field advantage. Not to mention that it showed the ability to copy spells, so anything we use in that Dungeon might come back to bite us in the ass.”

  “We’ll need to lure it to a place of our choosing,” Kari summed it up. “I draw a blank at how, though. We don’t even know what it wants.”

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  “It’s a voyeur,” Matthew replied bluntly. “Don’t you remember all the stalking and stolen videos? Tarantulas likes to watch.”

  “True…” Kari stroked her chin. “Tarantulas is a Blue and Green monster, so it should have a particular focus on information gathering.”

  “I see two ways we can lure it out of hiding,” John said upon the appropriate number of fingers. “Either we present it with a situation where it thinks it can observe us without risking itself… or we use the knowledge it wants as bait.”

  Matthew pondered the matter for a moment. What kind of intellectual content would a giant monstrous spider find appealing? Cat videos? Did it even know what a cat was? Books might do the trick, but Tarantulas might not be able to read either. It had only shown interest in camera feeds of human interactions.

  Matthew glanced at Kari’s flowchart, an idea immediately crossing his mind.

  “I think we have our hook already,” he said. “We just need a big fat line to go with it.”

  The date… the date went well.

  True to Kari’s warning, Marlene asked Matthew to spar with her at a gym before she even agreed to anything; a trial which he handily cheated through with copious amounts of spellcasting. Afterwards, they ate together, discussed art stuff— Marlene wanted to become a stylist, so they had quite a few drawings to compare—and even shared a few laughs.

  And that was it.

  No lightning bolt of love struck either of them, no wacky hijinks happened, and Matthew didn’t remember anything else of note. The date felt like a bowl of unseasoned rice: filling, but bland and lukewarm.

  Although Matthew enjoyed the moment, he knew he wouldn’t ask for a second round. And when he encountered Kari next, he could tell from the look on her face that the same would go for her.

  “It was a bust, wasn't it?” Matthew asked her after school ended. They gathered outside the entrance, waiting for John to come out and for Mr. Auguste to pick them up. “Your date?”

  “Oh?” Kari scratched the back of her head. “No, no, it’s… Daniel is super nice, but…” She looked away in embarrassment. “How was your date with Marlene, anyway?”

  “It was fine.” Matthew sighed. “It was fine.”

  “Yeah.” Kari gave him a knowing look. She had gone through the exact same thing on her side. “Just fine.”

  “I mean, we had some fun. Marlene is fun.” And cute too. “But…”

  “She’s not one of us,” Kari guessed with a forlorn expression. “I had the same issue with Daniel.”

  Matthew nodded in agreement. He had tried to follow King Coach’s advice and just be himself, but he couldn’t exactly tell Marlene about how he spent his free time tinkering with reality-altering spells and diving into man-eating hellholes. Her plans of becoming a stylist after graduation had sounded too mundane to him too.

  Marlene was nice, but the two of them lived in different worlds. He simply couldn’t relate to her, no more than she could understand his situation.

  “Besides, Daniel isn’t my type,” Kari said. “He didn’t check all the boxes.”

  “The boxes?” Matthew coughed. “Did you make a profile of your ideal man?”

  “Nothing that complicated.” Which was another way to say that yes, she did. “I’m just looking for a boy my age with black hair, neither fat nor too scrawny, moderately handsome—but not too cute because I would dislike seeing him being hit on—with Asian features being a plus but not a required condition, and a compatible blood type in case either of us need an emergency transfusion. He would need to be financially self-sufficient so we don’t have money issues, but not rich either so I don’t feel insecure about him leaving me for a gold digger; I would like my ideal man to have a strong will too, but still with a hidden sensitive side so I can comfort him when he has a bad time. He would also need a good relationship with his family and to be apolitical because I don’t want any drama, but still have an opinion on everything so we can always debate the best course of action. A good sense of humor without being cringe would help too.”

  “That’s a super common type of person,” Matthew deadpanned. “You just have to cross the street to find one.”

  “I know what I want.” Kari smiled at him. Having shared her tastes, she now expected him to give her his own. “And who would be your ideal woman, Matthew?”

  Matthew thought over it for a moment. His first instinct would be to say he wasn’t particularly picky so long as he vibed well with that person, but his date with Marlene had taught him that wouldn’t be enough. Perse had been the first girl he actually had a crush on, though that was probably regret and nostalgia speaking. His ideal woman…

  “My ideal woman is someone who looks sweet on the outside, and is a total nerd freak on the inside,” he replied bluntly. “Someone who answers whatever over-the-top plan I have with an even worse suggestion.”

  “So Amélia?” Kari guessed with a triumphant smirk.

  “What?” Matthew knew that look. “Kari, you dirty gossip…”

  “Come on, Matt, she has it bad for you,” Kari teased him. “She always sits next to you during lunch, she doesn’t object when you hold her hand, she invites you to her place alone to read manga… just ask her out already.”

  “Really?” Matthew scratched the back of his head. He did find her cute, and he doubted she had any date for the Fall Formal either. “You think I should?”

  “Matt, if you don’t ask her out, it’d be a crime,” Kari replied with a serious expression. “I’ll have to throw you into detention for blowing such an easy chance.”

  “Shouldn’t you send me to horny jail after I make a move on her first?” Matthew’s phone immediately started ringing like a sign from the heavens. He picked it up after recognizing the caller. “Hey, Jack!”

  “Hey, Matt!” Matthew could hear the noise of cars in the background. Jack had always been the kind of person to drive with a phone in hand. “I just arrived in Evermarsh. You free to hang out?”

  “Actually, we were just about to tackle a Dungeon,” Matthew replied. “Wanna come? For old time’s sake?”

  Of course, Matthew already knew the answer. Jack had given up on their Dungeon crawling days for years. His old teammate only asked that question out of politeness.

  Hence his surprise at the short, unexpected silence that followed.

  “You know what? Sure! It’ll be fun!” Jack chuckled on his side of the line. “Gimme the address and I’ll meet you there.”

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