Dungeon Wreckers 71: The Gate Opens

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Perse stared at him. 

Her face looked exactly like it did in her last moments, her expression frozen in a haunted cry of terror and betrayal. Her echo floated at the forefront of a mass of twisted souls screaming without lungs to hold their breaths. How long had these poor souls been trapped in their last moments? Years? Centuries? 

“Matt…” she said, her voice cutting through the chorus and calling him with the fervor of a drowned woman begging for help. “Matt… Matt…”

“We can return her,” Durge said upon sensing an opening. 

Matthew felt his black hole slightly waver in his hand from his hesitation, though he caught himself before it could fizzle out entirely. 

“That’s… that’s not her…” Matthew forced himself to focus back on the black hole rather than the face of his trauma. “It’s a trick. Even if she could return…” His fingers trembled from the strain of both his power and the weight of his guilt. “She wouldn’t forgive me.”

“Who cares what she thinks, so long as she lives?” Durge countered.

That did it. 

Matthew’s resolve wavered for just a moment, and the black hole in his hand shrank from an all-consuming sphere to an inky blot hardly thicker than his thumb. 

No! Matthew forced himself to focus on saving his masterful suicidal attack, but the gravitational pull had already fizzled out. No!

He knew deep within his heart that Perse wouldn’t forgive him for passing up a chance to destroy the Hydra and save the thousands, if not the millions of souls at stake with each Timeshift. She wouldn’t have allowed Matthew to spare her life at the cost of so many more. 

But he did consider it for a second, and that was plenty of time for Durge to strike. 

Matthew didn’t see the beam coming, but he sensed it burning its way through his chest and coming out of his back, melting his flesh. The pain was sharp, and the blowback threw him to his back while causing his Black Hole spell to die out, but he did not die. The beam had slipped right between his organs and cauterized everything in its path. 

The shot had been meant to incapacitate, not kill. 

“You truly had me worried for a second there,” Durge said upon landing on the platform. Its brief moment of panic had passed, replaced with the cockiness of a cat toying with its disarmed prey. “I still don’t see the point of that empathy thing, though. What benefit is there in something that drags you down so heavily in your hour of need?”

Matthew gritted his teeth and pointed his finger at Durge in an attempt to blow up its face, but the monster proved quicker. It grabbed Matthew by the throat—a gesture that riddled its hand with holes—and then surged with bluish Flux.

“Nervesurge,” Durge said. 

Then came the pain. 

There was no word in any human language capable of properly describing the agony that followed, blinding, raw, and transcendental. Every inch, every nerve in his entire body hurt with a pain so sharp he couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even think. Matthew’s vision went white and blue, and he came to wish for a death he knew would never come. 

Anything to make it stop. 

And stop it did, but only for a second. His nerves were so frayed from the surge that he barely felt Durge’s claws closing on his windpipe and his feet dangling into the void. Perse was here, facing him with a golden visage, smiling at him. 

Was that… Heaven? 

“Open the gate,” Perse said. Her lips moved on their own, yet no breath flowed out of them.

It wasn’t the gates of Heaven, but Hell playing a cruel prank. 

“You must open the gate,” the Hydra said with her voice, wearing her face. Perse’s neck had lengthened like a snake across the void to better face Matthew. “You must open the gate, Matt. You must open the gate.”

“Yes, my friend, open the gate so we can eat our fill and then eat, eat, eat!” Durge said in gleeful anticipation. “To this world and the ones beyond, so we may never go hungry again! A multiversal buffet of flesh and blood and screams!”

“You must open the gate,” the Hydra repeated like a broken record. That thing, much like its spawn, could only mimic the form of humanity without the substance. “You must open the gate, Matt. You must open the gate.”

His own world wasn’t enough for these parasites. They would empty Earth of its people, feast on every sentient soul within, and then move on to the next in a never-ending quest for satiety. 

“Get…” Matthew hissed through his teeth, though every movement cost him much willpower. “Bent… rather… die…”

“Now, now, Mathias, don’t you want the pain to end?” Durge asked. “Look, how about we bring your girl back to sweeten the deal, but better! We can create a hundred of lil’ Persephone, all for you! All you have to do… is to be a friend.”

“You must open the gate,” the false Perse said, so softly he almost forgot its true nature. “You must open the gate and then the next. You must open the gate.”

“Because if you don’t, I’ll torture you,” Durge promised, almost eagerly. “I’ll put you through so much pain your kind couldn’t invent the words to describe it yet. It breaks me to do it, but I will do it because you are forcing me. You are forcing my hand, Matty, you are forcing m–”

A streak of purple cut through the yellow void at the edge of Matthew’s vision. His eye turned to glance at a strange rift in the fabric of space shining with a violet hue. 

Was that a… a portal? 

“Huh?” Durge wondered upon spotting the phenomenon. “What is this–”

Maggie fell through the rift and punched Durge with an iron fist. 

The blow cracked a bone on impact, but the monster turned intangible almost instantaneously. Maggie phased through him, and Durge lost its grip on Matthew, causing both Crawlers to fall into the void below while the Hydra’s thousand heads screeched above them. They all chased after Matthew like human-faced snakes hungry for blood. 

Matthew struggled to remain conscious, yet he sensed his nerve-frayed body hitting a net of some kind. He caught a glimpse of Maggie landing on a translucent barrier that appeared out of nowhere and then bouncing off onto a floating platform. Explosions echoed above them alongside gunshots blasting hydra heads into the void. 

“Matthew, are you alright?!” He heard a voice that sounded like Nurse Florence, and then sensed a flow of Green Flux coursing through him. It washed away the pain, and the hole in his chest began to fill up on its own. “I have him, Finn!”

“Good!” someone that sounded exactly like John replied nearby. “He’s not dying until I kill him myself!”

Matthew recovered enough to look around. He had landed on one of Tarantulas’ magnetic tape webs in the midst of quite the crew. The Doc and Nurse Florence were here, healing him with sorcery, not too far away from John, Kari, and Ulysses of all people. The former two shot at Durge with guns while the latter threw mushrooms that unleashed corrosive spores that dissolved the Hydra's heads lunging at them on contact. 

How did they… Matthew wondered until he spotted a rift behind the Doc. The doorway between realities led straight into the Association’s speakeasy, where Sasha kept multiple portals open with other members feeding her Flux. Oh… of course…

Sasha could open portals leading to people, not just places.

Matthew never imagined her Key would be powerful enough to create one accessing the very heart of the Hydra, let alone more than one, but the likes of Liv and Crypto directly supplied her with Flux to compensate. 

It was Ulysses’ presence that shocked Matthew the most, however. Not only had his old friend finally left his house for the first time in years, but he was walking on his own two feet. Mushrooms and fungi had grown on the back of his spine to form some kind of moldy exoskeleton allowing him to walk around.

How long had he been practicing that technique in secret?  

“What…” Matthew scoffed as he struggled back to his feet. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving your suicidal ass!” John replied bluntly in between two shots. 

“When Ulysses called Maggie to inform her that you had visited him, your plan wasn’t hard to figure out,” the Doc replied with a sigh. “I had hoped you would have more sense than to do this, Matthew… but we still prepared for it.”

Matthew glared at Ulysses. He had done everything—everything—in his power to ensure no one else but him would perish today, so why? Why?!

“I didn’t do it for you,” Ulysses said with a shrug, glaring at Perse’s head amidst the fleshy mass of the Hydra with a mix of sorrow and determination. “I did it for her.”

His words caused Matthew to wince. “You shouldn’t have come,” he argued. “You should have let me die.”

“Matthew, how could you think we would let you…” Kari clenched her jaw in annoyance. “Just… look around you. Just look.”

He did, and then he saw. 

Durge floated in the void, firing lasers in multiple directions and shielding itself from projectiles coming from all sides. A dozen portals had opened across the void and spilled Crawlers out for blood. Durge tried to lunge at one group only to be tackled back by a colossal, birdlike abomination of stitched flesh and teeth with giant hands for wings. 

“G-Get away from my boyfriend!” Amélia shouted from the top of the abomination, her voice trembling in a mix of nervousness and anger. “P-please!”

Matthew even spotted Charlie of all people on a stone platform, charging bullets with explosive power, which Petro then fired at the Hydra. This cruel and effective combination let them blast multiple Hydra heads lunging at them, though the core itself quickly regenerated from all wounds. 

It wasn’t just Matthew’s teams, old and new, who had come. 

The entire Association had shown up. 

“Why?” Matthew muttered under his breath. 

“Because you are one of us,” Kari replied simply. “Because… because we care, Matthew.”

They all came in spite of the risk because they would rather have him in their life, in spite of everything, because they wouldn’t settle for an ending that required one of their own to die. 

Matthew struggled with a sudden urge to cry and sob, though the situation was too tense for him to do so. 

“Creator.” Matthew looked up to find Tarantulas hanging from a magnetic tape string. It had watched everything from the sidelines, waiting for something that eluded everyone. “The enemy is just a head. You know what we must do.”

Yes. The Hydra could recreate Durge as many times as it wanted. Now that he couldn’t open a black hole without killing everyone here, Matthew could only think of one way to end it all. 

A poisoned pill. 

“Cover us,” Matthew said as he opened a portal hole. “It won’t be long.”

“If you kill yourself, I’ll invent a spell to bring you back to life and then execute you myself for your cowardice,” John said. “Fair warning.”

Matthew cracked a smile. “You wish.”

He leaped through the portal with Tarantulas jumping after him, swinging on a web, Spider-Man style. Matthew shaped holes one after the other, letting his Doom Sense guide him through his allies’ projectiles straight to the Hydra.  

“Stop!” Durge snarled across the void, too far away to make any difference. “Disjun–”

A portal appeared right behind Durge, and Officer Kresnik jumped out of it in werewolf form alongside Mr. Chang. The two bulky Crawlers tackled the monster with such strength that they all ended up crashing down onto a yacht floating in the nothingness. The good officer and his ally had no hope of holding back Durge for long, but he didn’t need to. A few seconds had been enough for Matthew to reach his destination. 

He leaped out of a hole and opened another in a core of purple and screaming yellow faces. Matthew fell through it alongside Tarantulas into an abyss of colors. 

They had leaped straight into the Hydra’s heart.

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A/N: alright, I'm now pretty sure Dungeon Wreckers will conclude in two/three chapters depending on the epilogue's length. Hope you've enjoyed that ride ;)