Dungeon Wreckers 73: The End (Epilogue)

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It was December 24th, 2024 in Evermarsh. Time was half-stable, monsters were scarce, and Swiss chocolate was still the best.

Matthew still hated malls with a passion though, even Mr. Chang’s own. All the weeks of therapy he went through couldn’t stop him from looking over his shoulder whenever he spotted his friends walking into a shop or taking the wrong turn. But his Doom Sense had remained quiet for days now, so he had learned to relax a bit. 

The hunting season was nearing its end, and winter holidays were in. 

“That’s a lot of chocolate, Matthew,” Kari complained once they finished their shopping spree and stuffed the goods in her brand-new Toyota. Matthew’s pile of food reached so high they would have to move some of them to the backseat to fit it all. “I know we’re over thirty this year between the new members and guests, but that’s still way too much.”

“Chocolate releases endorphins, it’s science,” Matthew argued back. That, and his girlfriend had a sweet tooth the size of the Eiffel Tower. “Don’t you want people to be happy, Kari? I say it’s worth the diabetes.”

“But you only brought chocolate,” Kari countered. “There’s no variety. They’ll get sick of it.”

“I’ve covered for him, as usual,” John reassured her. “I’ve bought a large supply of croissants, pains au chocolat, and other delicacies.”

“Pain au chocolat? I thought they called it ‘chocolatine’?” Matthew asked upon vaguely remembering a French class. 

“Only the semi-Spanish rednecks in the southwest,” John replied. “Are we good on the drinks?”

“Petro and Sasha called me, they’re taking care of that,” Kari said as she checked their shopping list. “Has everyone bought their gifts?”

“Yeah,” Matthew said upon putting the bouquet of flowers he had purchased earlier in the back of the car, alongside the rabbit plushies for Amélia, a highly decorated traditional knife for Kari, a B&C collector edition for John, and other wonders for the rest of the Association. “I’m good.”

“Same,” John replied. He had bought fewer gifts than Matthew and Kari, though it might be because he would also leave the party early to celebrate the evening with his mother at the hospital. 

“Alright, let’s go then,” Kari decided. “We’ll go to the church and then hit the Neverland right after.”

Matthew sat in the back while Kari took the wheel and John moved to the front. The group had been hard at work farming Lucky Star over the last few weeks and managed to gather a sizable dragon’s hoard through shrewd investments. Kari kept most of her share and invested the rest in her Toyota, while Matthew instead bought the empty spot where his old house used to be. 

He had revised his original plan from building himself a maid mansion to just a cozy home, and he wouldn’t have it any other way. 

“Soooo…” Kari looked at Matthew’s reflection in the rearview. “How are things going with Amy?”

“They’re going great so far,” Matthew replied calmly. He and Amélia had been steady for about four months now. It was nice, though the passion of the early weeks had cooled off a bit. Matthew wasn’t sure how long the relationship would last—TV had taught him high school sweethearts lasted for life, but pop culture had lied to him before—since they both had mental health issues to deal with, though he was determined to give it his best. 

“I just can’t believe you’re the first of us to enter a steady relationship,” Kari lamented. “Even Mr. O’Connor and Liv are getting back together. I feel so left out.”

“What about that guy you went to the Fall Formal with?” John asked. For all of his talk of considering the event beneath him, he had ended up going there with some girl from another school mad enough to take him up on his offer. Matthew had no idea if he was still seeing her and knew better than to pester John about it. “Did you already dump him?”

“It was just a one-time thing,” Kari replied with a sigh. “I’m never going to experience a high-school romance at this rate…”

“I’m just saying, Amélia has been wanting to try a threesome for a while,” Matthew teased her. Though by ‘threesome’ she meant ‘cheating roleplay straight out of a Japanese porn manga.’ “So if you wanna try out the high school throuple experience…”

Kari’s cheeks turned bright pink, much to Matthew’s amusement. “Aha!” he said. “You considered it!”

“I did not!” Kari protested, which only caused her to redden further. 

“But the image flashed in your head, and now you can’t repress it!”

“You’re unbearable, Matthew,” Kari complained with a sigh before muttering something under her breath. “I can’t believe this guy fits most of my boxes…”

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” John mused. “That’s what happens when you have low standards.”

“I heard that,” Matthew complained in the back. 

“Seriously though, I’ve missed your terrible jokes,” Kari said upon calming down. “Don’t get me wrong, I like your new mellow maturity, but you smile less often now.”

“Personally, I find him more boring,” John said. “But he’s also more tolerable now, so it evens out.”

“More mellow?” Matthew considered his friends’ words for a moment. “I smile less often, yeah… but that’s because I’m genuine now.”

He had accepted himself as Matthew, but no longer suppressed the Mathias side of him. The Doc’s weeks of therapy had finally allowed him to strike some sort of… balance, he guessed? Like, he didn’t feel the need to crack jokes willy-nilly to hide the pain or sorrow anymore. 

He had grown comfortable with melancholy. 

“And that’s good,” Kari agreed. “I’ll take your true self over a funny liar any day.”

“Now who’s the one teasing the other?” Matthew replied with some amusement. 

The hands-free phone rang as if on cue to save Kari from her embarrassment. She picked up the call and put it on the loudspeaker. 

“Hey,” Crypto’s voice came out of the radio. “How are my favorite Crawlers?”

“Hi, Crypto,” Matthew replied. “We bring gifts and bribes.”

“Kresnik will be most happy about the latter,” Crypto quipped before moving straight to business. “Finn detected another stage-one Dungeon near the ice rink, and we’re raiding it before the party. I know you already have something planned and we’ve got more than enough manpower to deal with it, but I wondered if you wanted to participate.”

“I would rather sit out of the Christmas raid, personally,” Kari said with a sigh. “I’m out of Flux from all the multicolor spellcrafting…”

“Sorry, I’ve an appointment,” Matthew apologized. “One I can’t miss.” 

“We’ll wreck a Dungeon tomorrow,” John promised. 

“No worries,” Crypto replied, taking the rejection in stride. “I’ll see you at the party then.”

The mere idea that a team could agree to sit out of a Dungeon raid would have been unthinkable a few months ago. The knowledge that they could now afford to rest now and then warmed Matthew’s heart. 

However, while Dungeons were rarer… they still existed. 

Part of Matthew wished he had been surprised. Of course not all corrupted cores would have immediately reverted back into Keys once they blew up the Hydra’s heart, though at least two-thirds of them did so on the spot. There were simply bad apples in every harvest. 

Independent Dungeons were a lot more manageable than before though, largely because they didn’t share information between them the way the old ones did and thus didn’t adapt as quickly. They had grown much rarer as well, which allowed Crawlers to commit more forces to them rather than being stretched thin and in turn increased their success rate. They had also made much faster progress in sorcery research now that academic-minded Association members like the Doc didn’t have to be deployed on patrol at all times. Color-combination spells were growing more and more common in the Crawler community. 

All in all, it seemed Dungeons were on their way to go extinct in a few years if they kept up the pressure. Crypto’s prediction that 2024 might undergo a third Timeshift now looked more and more remote, though the risk that some Dungeons might grow big enough or link up to form a new Hydra remained. 

At least they had cleaned up most of Evermarsh. The city was secure for perhaps the first time in a decade. 

Matthew—like many—still wondered about the long-term implications of a lack of Timeshifts. He had seen how frayed history had become over time. Would Disbelief fully recover and cause all magical phenomena to vanish? Or would sorcery become a part of life? Jack showed that Crawlers could turn into superpowered killers. Matthew wasn’t sure what would happen with the likes of Charlie once they had run out of Dungeons to unite against… though he did offer to whack anybody Matthew wanted as a ‘thank you’ for saving him from Jack. 

The future remained difficult to decipher, though Tarantulas warned him that his universe would take its ‘natural course’ without the Hydra; whatever that meant.

“It wished me to be happy…” Matthew muttered under his breath. 

“You mean the creature you saw in the rift?” Kari asked, with Matthew nodding. “I wonder if it was what a Key truly looks like…”

“I’m not so sure,” John replied. “The mere fact that it understands the concept of ‘happiness’ would point to it being human in some way, or at least close.”

“Keys reflect our wishes or desires according to Mr. O’Connor,” Kari suggested. “So they have to understand us somewhat.”

“I think they want what’s best for us, in their own way,” Matthew concurred. 

Keys bound themselves to the soul, the consciousness, whatever they called that invisible thing that made them human. Malevolent ones like Dungeons or Jack’s power sought to devour those sparks to grow stronger and larger, while the rest tried to give their users what they wanted. 

Matthew wondered if the threat of Dungeons would end once they finally found a way to communicate with these entities. Tarantulas could share information with them enough to learn about the Hydra’s origins, and the Doc had been hard at work trying to replicate that success. 

The sight of the Old Church snapped Matthew out of his thoughts. Kari parked the car near the entrance and then took a deep breath. 

“Do you want us to stay put?” she asked with some hesitation. “We don’t want to intrude…”

“No, no, it’s okay.” Matthew scratched the back of his head. “Actually, it’s… it’ll be easier with you two at my side.”

Everything became easier with his friends at his side. Even living. Especially living. 

Matthew half-expected John to give him a hard time about needing them around, but his friend simply nodded and stepped out of the car alongside Kari. Matthew grabbed his flower bouquet and then led the way to the graveyard. 

It was odd. As much as he liked Amélia, Matthew didn’t feel comfortable enough to bring her to Perse’s grave yet. His bond with his teammates was older, stronger, and thicker in a way. It seemed… unbreakable. 

The trio arrived to find Ulysses and Maggie already there, each with their own flowers. Ulysses stood on his two legs straight up. Disbelief had explained his ‘miraculous recovery’ by rationalizing Nurse Florence’s sorcery as a new experimental procedure, though from what Matthew had heard, he still struggled with running now and then. 

The mere fact that his old friend had started to leave his house again was already a miracle in itself. 

“Sam isn’t here?” Matthew asked upon adding his bouquet to the pile his old teammates had already put on the tombstone. Perse’s grave might as well be drowning in flowers. 

“I tried calling her,” Maggie replied with a scowl. “She won’t even pick up.”

“She was done with us a long time ago,” Ulysses said bluntly, and he was probably right. 

Sam’s absence didn’t surprise Matthew, since she had run away from Evermarsh for many years and did her best to repress the truth the same way he did. The best he could do was hope she had found her own sense of closure over their past, wherever she was. 

Matthew thus found himself standing in front of the gravestone with his teammates, old and new. He had thought of a speech on his way to the church, but no word came out of his mouth now that he faced Perse’s resting place. Somehow, he and the others found themselves settling into a solemn minute of silence. 

“Ulysses?” Matthew asked softly. “Maggie?”

“What?” Ulysses replied gruffly. 

“Do you hate me?” Matthew stared at the tomb somberly. “For what I did?”

The silence grew heavier for a moment, with Maggie’s jaw clenching on its own. “No, Matthew, I don’t hate you,” she said, her hands rubbing her arms in a rare moment of vulnerability. “I… I don’t think I ever did. I hated myself, though, for failing her.”

Ulysses took a deep breath. “I don’t hate you… but I don’t forgive you either.”

Matthew scoffed. He had said the exact same thing to Tarantulas under very similar circumstances. “I understand.”

Some bridges could be rebuilt, but never crossed again. Maybe they would make up one day, though Matthew had the feeling it would take a very long time. 

“I think she’s resting now, for what it’s worth,” Matthew said. Whatever part of Perse the Hydra had eaten had been released with its destruction, and Durge’s demise had finally put an end to this particular nightmare. “At long last.”

Matthew didn’t believe in Heaven, but if that place existed, then Persephone Werner had surely found her way there.

Neither Ulysses nor Maggie contested that. Matthew guessed that they had finally found a measure of closure too, in their own way. He guessed that was what Perse would have wanted, for them to move on and face life with a smile rather than regrets. 

“It’s time to go,” John stated. “We’ll be late otherwise.”

“You’re coming to the celebration?” Kari asked Ulysses and Maggie. 

“I guess,” Ulysses replied. Although he hadn’t officially joined the Association, he did participate in a few Dungeon runs in the past month. Maggie simply nodded in confirmation. 

As the group departed, Matthew glanced one last time at his friend’s tomb. The world was much safer than it had ever been, but this wasn’t the end. Not by a long shot. 

Maybe there was a lesson to draw from that. Life was a succession of problems, and no power in the world could change that… but if they could fix every issue one at a time, then there might come a day when they could call it a job well done.

The otherworldly entity in the rift had asked Matthew to find happiness.

And he would live up to that request one day.

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A/N: Special thanks to my editors Daniel Zogbi and Charles Setser for their priceless assistance, and to my patrons on Patreon for supporting this story to its conclusion. 

Last year, I ended up burning out midway through my Commerce Emperor series and decided to try writing a short novel as a way to blow off steam. I’d been on a psychological drama RPG bing (playing the likes of Omori, Fear & Hunger: Termina, Persona 5 Royal, and so on…) and Xianxia novels, so I proposed two choices on a story poll to my patrons: Dungeon Wreckers and what would become Gunsoul. The poll ended up being so close that I decided to write them both. 

In hindsight, I feel this might have been a mistake because I bit a lot more than I could chew. Though Dungeon Wreckers and Gunsoul did help me get out of my Commerce Emperor funk, writing three stories at once (on top of my others) quickly became unmanageable; and abandoning one midway didn’t exactly feel like a good option either. Dungeon Wreckers ended up going through many pauses and took way longer to complete than Gunsoul as a result, and this also delayed the release of other books like Commerce Emperor 3. Dungeon Wreckers also underperformed on Royal Road, while my new books didn’t work too well on Amazon.   

It’s a weird situation. I feel I’ve never been more productive than I am right now (my wordcount is markedly higher than the previous year), but that most of my energy is dispersed where it shouldn’t be. I think I need to take a step back and reassess my priorities now that Dungeon Wreckers is done. 

In any case, Dungeon Wreckers will probably be considered one of my weirdest projects. I wanted to return to the ‘Colorverse’ of The Perfect Run and Magik Online for some time (and I especially wanted to provide some closure from some of the latter’s characters like Jack or Kari) so I could explore the color-based power system in another form; in this case, as standard spells and sorcery rather than superhero powers or LitRPG abilities. I feel I semi-succeeded there in that I created something flexible, but this led to a recurring issue where the characters had too many broad tools to deal with their problems at once. 

I’m most proud of the setting and characters, though, and I feel the core trio had one of my best dynamics yet. I’ve always been a fan of the New World of Darkness tabletop game, and especially Hunter the Vigil (which follows human vigilantes fighting supernatural threats), and Dungeon Wreckers was something of a love letter to that kind of setting. The story was envisioned as an exploration of teen/shonen dramas like Persona or Jujutsu Kaisen where young people fight monsters and horrors they should be way too young to face. In the end, I guess I wrote Dungeon Wreckers as a story of child soldiers facing the psychological consequences of their lifestyle and their struggle to move on with their lives. 

Another subject I wanted to explore was consciousness and the meaning of life, illustrated by Durge and Tarantulas; both being monsters with the potential to become human (in contrast with the likes of Jack, who was a human embracing inhuman impulses) but meeting life with hedonistic nihilism and curious optimism respectively. My late maternal grandfather—a concentration camp survivor—once told me that only the hopeful had made it out of the horrors he faced, and I think his words strike true more than ever.

The difference between living and surviving is whether or not we thrive for something. 

I know Dungeon Wreckers will be too weird for most, but I hope it provided a novel experience for you. Long-term readers of The Perfect Run will also recognize the Hydra for a certain place explored in the trilogy; the mystery of Monaco/color-based Dungeons was something I’ve kept in reserve for a while and it was fun revisiting that loose end. 

In any case, I hope you had fun reading this standalone. I’m probably going to focus on more ‘mainstream/commercial’ premises than niche ones like this one for the near-future, but I hope Dungeon Wreckers will keep a special place in your hearts. It certainly will for me. 

Best regards,

Maxime/Voidy.