Matthew was no athlete, but when he had to run, he could run.

  He and Kari managed to reactivate their Peak spells, the magic stripping them of their exhaustion and letting them race ahead at the speed of Olympic runners. John couldn’t sustain the spell himself, but he managed to keep pace with them by charging himself with his own Key’s power.

  It didn’t change a thing.

  Matthew could hear Durge chasing after them, crashing through walls and crushing concrete under its hand-feet. He knew better than anyone how fast that monster was; and it had somehow managed to grow even faster. The creature’s frantic and maddened footsteps grew ever closer with each passing second.

  No amount of speed would save them.

  They had to cheat.

  “Grab my hands!” Matthew shouted. He squeezed his friends’ palms with all of his strength and then unleashed his Lucky Star. All the good fortune he stored for money-making or emergencies flowed out of him in a shining wave of golden Flux.

  Cracks immediately spread across the corridor and the ceiling collapsed behind them. Tons of debris fell upon Durge and buried it alive in a tomb of concrete and steel. Its shriek of rage proved louder than the collision noise and continued to echo long after the trio finally escaped the hallway.

  “That won’t delay him for long!” Matthew warned his teammates as they reached an escalator. He had seen Durge adapt to spells in a matter of minutes and even seconds before, and he held no illusion that Lucky Star would be any exception.

  Using Calamity Force would be a disaster too, since the spell only robbed the target of good luck for a time and then let them recover their good fortune. There was no way his team could kill Durge before he recovered and enjoyed a terrifying stroke of karmic luck.

  “What do we do?!” Kari asked as they ran up the escalator, her breath short in spite of the spell. “Matthew–”

  “What do you think?!” Matthew snapped. “We’ll split up!”

  John immediately shot down the idea. “No way!”

  “I’m the one he wants!” Matthew retorted. “The Mall has multiple exits, so if we each aim for a different one–”

  “We’re not abandoning you to that creep!” Kari cut in with a tone that broke no disobedience. “It will kill you or worse!”

  “I don’t want–” Matthew didn’t dare finish his sentence, his voice growing quieter. “I don’t want… not again…”

  He couldn’t survive witnessing another of his teammates die in front of him.

  “Nobody's kicking the bucket today!” John replied, his jaw clenching. He seemed to find the mere thought that he would die earlier than Matthew insulting. “I sense an exit nearby!”

  “He’s right!” Kari replied when they reached the escalator’s summit and the next floor. Statues of inhuman, faceless entities stood next to empty checkout lines leading into what appeared to be a men's wear store. “This way!”

  Matthew followed after his team and let go of their hands once he ran out of good luck to spend. They arrived in a bright, open showroom filled with cloth shelves, small circular dressing rooms, and perfume stands. All of the goods looked to be of splendid quality at first glance, but a closer inspection revealed thousands of small errors: suits with four sleeves instead of two, hats with eyes, cologne bottles filled with red liquids that weren’t perfumes, glasses with multicolored tinted lenses, and trousers with human teeth for flies. Matthew quickly picked up on the Flux signature of an exit a few rooms away.

  Durge arose from the floor in the middle of the hall, blocking their path.

  He didn’t break through it, no. He simply phased through solid concrete like a ghost, an Orange halo enshrouding him, and then dissipated the effect to land on solid ground.

  Unfortunately, it looked like an Intangibility spell was achievable.

  “Matthew, you sneaky little trickster! Quite the surprise you had in store!” Durge pointed a finger at Matthew. “Here’s the adult version!”

  A bright golden swirl of magic surrounded Matthew before he could even process the attack. An immense spiritual pressure fell upon his shoulders as a Yellow spell stronger than even Calamity Force twisted his fate. Two phantasmal pictures suddenly appeared and floated around his head like moons orbiting his skull, alongside a one-minute countdown.

  The first card, Hell, showed him hanging from a cross, Jesus-style. The second card—ironically entitled Heaven—showed a winged angel’s skull with a halo.

  Matthew instinctively knew what each card meant, and the way his Doom Sense reacted to each—sharply when glancing at Hell and agonizing when peeking at Heaven—confirmed it. The choice wasn’t between good luck and misfortune, but between pain and death.

  And he had to pick.

  “I would choose quickly if I were you, or else it’s random,” Durge taunted him. “Heaven’s fine too. Dead’s fine, Matthew. I can make it work.”

  “Wasp formation!” John shouted back, his hands reaching out to his teammates and charging them both with Red Flux.

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  Matthew charged in a mix of panic and rage, both hands raised with finger-guns and blasting madly. John fired electrical beams to assist while Kari circled Durge from the left with her weapons drawn.

  Matthew felt his Key touching Durge and attempting to open holes, only for an invisible force to push it back and cancel the effect. The enemy meanwhile simply shrugged off the lightning.

  Other Crawlers had already hit it with way more power.

  “Are you taking me lightly, Matthew?” Durge asked, its many eyes barely sparing the approaching Kari a glance. “Did you downgrade me? Where’s the A-material?”

  The wasp formation, contrary to what the name would imply, was an escape tactic. The goal was to have Kari—the wasp—pretend to approach the target in close combat so that they would feel threatened and then focus their attention on her while the others ran past her. Once she seemed about to engage the enemy, John would use his motion-redirection Key to pull her back at the last second.

  It seemed to work for a brief second, with Durge raising a hand at Kari. The monster’s arm unnaturally stretched with the speed of a bullet, its fist surging at her like one of those spring-loaded childrens’ toys Matthew always saw in cartoons. Kari’s body surged with Blue and Green Flux as she combined Peak and Premium Thoughts. She gracefully dodged the blow with an impossible leap and flew through the air…

  Then two rifts in space opened in an instant: one in front of Durge’s fist, and the other in front of Kari’s skull.

  John hastily used the charge he imbued Kari with to pull her out of the way. His Key allowed him to change his teammate’s trajectory just in time to prevent Durge from hitting her in the face and tearing off her head, but the monster still managed to grab her by the ankle and pulled her through the rift in space. He slammed Kari against the nearest shelf like a fly and shattered it in a sickening crack.

  “Kari!” Matthew shouted in alarm, his gaze going red… literally. The countdown had nearly reached zero and his Doom Sense buzzed louder than ever in the back of his head. He had to choose now.

  Cursing, Matthew picked Hell.

  His eyepatch instantly vanished into thin air.

  With no sorcery-imbued object to keep his Key safely restrained, the hungry hole dwelling in his eye socket sucked in everything within sight, swallowing shelves, clothes, and debris. John was nearly thrown back into the abyss along with them a second before Matthew barely managed to cover his eye with his hand. A flying pole carried forward by the momentum hit Matthew in the chest and threw him back to the floor.

  “Fascinating, isn't it? I can never tell what the Hell penalty will be for a given target, but it’s always unexpected in its cruelty!” Durge crawled towards him with a malicious glint in his many eyes. “Come on, feed the hole, Matthew! Aren’t you hungr–”

  John grabbed the nearest shelf, charged it with his Key, and then threw it at Durge at bullet speeds with the intent to kill.

  The object shattered on impact like a glass thrown at an ancient rock.

  “Was that supposed to tickle, reddie boy?” Durge asked, seeming more curious than anything.

  “It was supposed to hurt,” John replied defiantly as he reached out for another piece of furniture to throw at the enemy.

  “To hurt?” Durge’s many mouths roared with laughter, his attention fully focusing on John. “To hurt?”

  John’s eyes glowed with blue light, and his mouth let out a scream.

  In all of their missions together, Matthew had never heard his teammate scream. John grunted and complained and snarled sometimes… but he never let the pain show. The very sound was foreign to Matthew’s ears, deep and horrifying. His only eye could only watch his friend collapse to the floor, spasming like a man possessed from a pain so intense that he ended up frothing at the mouth.

  “I call it Nervesurge,” Durge rambled with cruel glee. “Direct psychic stimulation of your pain receptors. You can’t imagine how many hominids I had to test it on before I perfected it. I would imagine it must feel like all of your skin is being pulled back while your naked flesh is being drenched in salt… but I don’t really feel pain myself, so I’ll let you make your own opinion.”

  However terrible the scream, the sudden silence that followed felt immensely more terrifying.

  Matthew’s heart skipped a beat when John grew quiet without warning. He panted, his breath shorter than ever, his fingers trembling. His teammate had stopped moving, saliva drooling from his mouth, his skin pale, his eyes blank. Either he had passed out from the sheer pain, or… or…

  Please God, please, please no… Matthew’s brain burned in his skull, flashes of blood and darkness obscuring his vision. Not again…

  “You’ll have to explain that empathy derangement to me one day, Matthew,” Durge said upon grabbing John by the throat with one hand. His other arm stretched to pick an unconscious Kari from the nearby debris. “I’ve done my best to understand it by myself, I truly tried. I’ve eaten those ‘kids’ things in front of their ‘parents,’ sliced legs off a human while he screamed for mercy, and found so many ways to hurt your kind… but neither your cries nor tears elicited more than indifference from me. I truly don’t get it.”

  Matthew struggled back up to his feet, his hand struggling to hold back his own Key’s power. The situation was beyond terrible. John had stopped moving—Matthew couldn’t even tell if he still breathed—and blood dripped from Kari’s unconscious face. Durge could kill them both in an instant.

  Meanwhile, Matthew struggled to contain his own power. The hole in his eye hungered to consume everything, friends and foes alike. Removing his hand to cast a spell would unleash it on everyone present and potentially harm his teammates.

  “What’s the point of sharing somebody else’s pain? What benefit could it possibly provide?” Durge lifted his unconscious teammates into the air. “This evolutionary adaptation is truly a maddening contradiction!”

  “I’ll…” Matthew breathed in and out, his fingers trembling with both dread and rage. “I’ll kill you for this one day… I swear, I’ll–”

  “Is that any way to treat an old friend? Especially when I have a wonderful proposition for you?” Durge cackled. “See, you have two friends, and I only have one mouth big enough to swallow them whole. Hence I consent, in my magnanimous generosity, to give you a limited time offer.”

  Durge dangled his teammates above his watering maws.

  “If you open the gate, I’ll let you pick which of them shall live.”

  The ultimatum rang across the hall like a curse.

  “Should I start with the female, Matthew? I recall that you brought one once… Persephone, was that her name?” Durge chuckled, the noise unsettling in its mockery of humanity. “She had such tasty legs!”

  The cruel jab drained Matthew of all his strength. The way Durge’s eyes glanced at Kari with appetite woke up an ancient fear he had tried so hard to keep buried in his heart.

  “Let… let them go. Both of them.” Matthew’s jaw clenched. A horrendous idea had crossed his mind, but he… he couldn’t live with the other option. “I’ll… I’ll open the gate if you let them leave alive.”

  “Now, now, don’t be greedy, Matthew. Friendship is give and take. If I don’t take something from you now and then, you’ll stop valuing my contributions and disrespect me.” Durge licked its fangs. “You’re the one who doesn’t want to make our relationship work, you selfish, self-centered ape! All you do is take my sweet joy awa–”

  Durge abruptly straightened up and half his many eyes glanced to his left.

  Matthew’s gaze followed that gaze and his heart pounded again with hope. A figure that wasn’t there before had appeared out of thin air and walked among the shelves. A loosened tie hung from his sweaty black suit.

  “You bastard,” Mr. Chang said, a dao sword in his hand. “You made me miss work.”

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