Dungeon Wreckers 70: Heart of Darkness

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Of course Durge would be here at the end of all things. 

Matthew would have been afraid once, terrified even; but he was too dead inside for fear. Only anger remained, alongside the determination to see the bastard die before him. 

“Don’t be sorry,” Matthew replied coldly, Flux gathering in his hands. “I hoped you would be here today.”

“Aww, I knew you cared, Mathias!” Durge insisted on the name like a killer twisting a knife into their victim’s wounds. “I was starting to wonder. You brought that gift I put in your eye to each of our bonding sessions, and yet you never said thank you. I found it quite rude of you.”

“You knew we would find our way to the lower levels eventually, so you put the passage where none of us would look.” Matthew simmered with rage at being tricked. They had always wondered where the Mall’s limitless reserves of Flux that caused Durge to constantly regenerate came from. “All the cores and monsters I threw in here kept you alive.”

Durge let out a droning noise which Matthew took for a laugh. “I think you hominids call it symbiosis.”

Matthew’s heart skipped a beat. “Symbiosis?”

“Haven’t we monsters provided much entertainment in return for your contributions? What would you be without us? Just some bland and boring kid whining whenever he loses his cellphone? I’ve eaten so many of those, they gave me indigestion!” Durge’s tongues licked its many fangs. “If you ask me… killing that little Perse spiced you up as a person.”

Matthew raised his hand and blasted him with a hole.

Or at least he tried. Durge leaped off the yacht a second before a cannonball-sized hole appeared in the boat and split it in half. It lunged across the void at the building on which Tarantulas and Matthew stood, forcing them both to take a step back as the monster crashed onto the spot they used to occupy. The impact cracked bricks and sent debris flying into the infinite dimension surrounding them. 

“I can’t help but notice you didn’t bring any other hominids with you today,” Durge noted as it stood up and glared at its two opponents with its many eyes. Its arms extended in their direction at bullet speed. “Did I kill them?” 

Tarantulas activated its Intuimotion spell and dodged the blow. Durge showed no hesitation in striking at a fellow monster, its arm twisting in midair like a snake searching for prey. Tarantulas’ agility far surpassed that of Kari, however, and its inhuman morphology let it spin around itself and avoid a lethal blow. 

Matthew himself didn’t bother dodging. He instead opened a portal in front of him and the other entrance behind Durge itself, let the monster’s arm enter it, and then cut it off in an instant. Durge’s severed hand fell to the ground and disappeared into multicolored Flux particles. 

“New trick?” Durge asked, its appendage immediately regenerating. “I hope I killed your friends though, I truly hope I did. After much soul-searching, I have reached the conclusion that anything short of global anthropocide is a waste of my talent.”

“Why?” Tarantulas asked as it kept its distances with its fellow monster, its body tense yet its voice remaining curious. 

“Why not?” Durge glanced at the Hydra’s core with its many eyes. “Look upon our demiurge, spider! Our drooling idiot of a god!”

Although Matthew kept most of his attention squarely on Durge, his eye briefly glanced at the Hydra’s core. The entity was more vulnerable than it had ever been, yet failed to react or muster any kind of defense. The Major Chicken Dungeon tried to negotiate, the Church one fought like hell. This one just watched. 

Matthew sensed no intelligence coming from that entity; only hunger. 

“I think it used to be like Mathias once. A human, ‘till his powers spilled out of his monkey brain and devoured him. Now all that remains is the appetite, the instinct, the need to consume and spread.” Durge raised its hands like a showman introducing a marvel. “Isn’t it funny how life works, Mathias?! All that effort to move from primordial ooze to a two-legged ape, only to go right back where you started!”

Human? Had that thing been a Crawler whose ever-growing power consumed them like Jack eventually lost all humanity? Or maybe Durge was just messing with him. It didn’t matter either way. Matthew didn’t care where the Hydra came from, only how it would die.

He did have another question in mind, though. The only one whose answer he craved. 

“Before I kill you and that thing which you serve–” Matthew said. 

“That we serve,” Durge interrupted him. “You’ve fed it as much as I did.”

Matthew clenched his teeth and ignored the comment. “Why?”

“Ugh, they all ask me that, they all ask me that in the end.” Durge hunched like a beast, showing annoyance. “Why, why, why? Does it even matter? Would it make you feel better if I told you our food died for a purpose, that there’s a plan?”

“Answer the goddamn question,” Matthew snapped coldly. 

Durge stood still for a moment, its posture that of a wild beast considering whether or not to pounce. Its tongues clicked in its many maws. 

“Have you ever eaten a dog?” it finally asked. 

The question was so strange, so weird, that Matthew took a few seconds to answer. “No.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Durge replied. “They’re unfulfilling, barely any flesh or thoughts to feed on… but all those that ventured into this place fought me back with all their strength. They didn’t ask why or begged for their mothers or for more time like apes who think themselves smart. A dog doesn’t need to understand life’s meaning, because it knows it’s the only one it has and that’s enough!”

The answer did not satisfy Tarantulas in the slightest. “There has to be more to life than that.”

“Why? Because it will make you feel special? Because it can let you think you aren’t that different from bugs and beasts?” Durge growled in contempt. “You’re looking for something that’s not there, because you don’t want to accept that existence is meat.”

“Then why not coexist with mankind?” Tarantulas argued, a hint of distress in its voice. It reminded Matthew of a child begging its teacher for an acceptable answer rather than the harsh truth. “We do not have to kill them.”

“Yes, yes, we could coexist with the apes outside. It’s just that we won’t, because the truth is that humans… humans…”

Durge raised its claws and licked them. 

“Humans are finger lickin’ good!”

Matthew finger-gunned that bastard right where it stood. 

The hole he blew in Durge took out most of its torso—the same way it once killed Perse—yet failed to slay it. Its remaining eyes all fired red beams in all directions, vaporizing the building on which they stood. Matthew opened a portal beneath himself and fell through it while Tarantulas leaped off the platform towards another floating object. 

Matthew had the answer he sought, and it was as he expected. Durge was just a crazy predator. Matthew and so many had projected human feelings and thoughts on the Hydra and its spawn because a few could talk back to them, but it had been the equivalent of anthropomorphizing lumps of cancer. 

In the end, they just lived to kill.

Matthew reappeared through the portal across the void, far away from Durge and closer to the Hydra’s core. He floated in midair and pointed his fingers at the latter in an attempt to blow it up. A small hole appeared on the ooze, only to be near-instantly filled by yellow and purple slime. As Matthew suspected, standard attacks wouldn’t work on an entity so powerful. 

Oh well, he tried. 

“You never learn, do you?” Durge laughed upon fully regenerating, its body crackling with power. “Disjunction!”

A pulse of White Flux expanded across the void, disrupting all particles in the air. Tarantulas’ Intuimotion field instantly shattered like glass, and the monster let out a static screech as if it was bugging the hell out. The wave reached Matthew next.

He felt his Doom Sense and Peak passive spells being stripped off him. His Yog-Sothoth Key briefly fizzled out, his portals disappearing, his power fading away…

Then his body surged with darkness. 

Black Flux erupted from every inch of his body in response to the attack, shrouding Matthew in dark particles. He sensed his Yog-Sothoth Key’s power returning to him and riddling his shirt with holes on its own. Smaller portals appeared all around him like a swarm of blots floating in the void.

Matthew no longer bothered to restrict his power, and the Hydra shuddered. 

The blob seemed to compress ever so slightly, like an animal suddenly spotting a fire. It began to radiate more than hunger. 

Fear.

The Hydra was afraid, and that gave Matthew the resolve to finish the job.

Matthew landed on a floating concrete piece that resembled a piece of yacht pier, the ground partly dissolving at his mere touch. With no time to waste and an eagerness to end this nightmare once and for all, he opened his hand and focused all of his power inside it. 

“What’s this?” Durge looked almost curious as it cloaked itself in Orange Flux and began to float away from its own platform to chase after Matthew. “Black doesn’t suit you, Mathias. Red would be be–”

“You should flee, Tarantulas,” Matthew said coldly. The spider was recovering from the Disjunction spell on another platform, but Matthew wouldn’t stop for its sake. “You have a couple seconds.”

Black and Yellow Flux gathered into a sphere at the center of his palm, a black void too deep for words to describe, an infant heart of inky darkness that would swallow light and devour time itself. Its mere existence bent the fabric of space around itself, drawing dust and particles into its hungry embrace. Gravity began to slowly pull objects towards its center. 

“What the…” Durge suddenly froze in mid-flight, as a gravitational force began to pull it towards Matthew faster than it had anticipated. “What are you doing?!”

“Creating a black hole,” Matthew replied. “Collapsing infinity into zero.”

The very concrete beneath his feet had begun to crack. Debris and dust floated towards the maw in the fabric of reality and disappeared within. Matthew’s Key protected him from his own power, but only to a point. The hole’s hunger was a mirror of the Hydra that first spawned it. It sought to plunge all that it could catch within the deepest dark. Not even its maker would be safe once it grew large enough. 

And Matthew was fine with that. 

“This hole leads nowhere and nowhen,” Matthew muttered under his breath. He admired the dark star as it grew from a speck to a sphere slightly larger than his palm. “It will grow until it devours us all. You, me, this awful place…” 

Durge’s eyes widened all at once, as it suddenly began to fly away. “You don’t have the guts!”

Matthew snorted and upped the pressure. “Watch me.”

The gravitational pull shattered the platform on which he stood until he could only float in the yellow void. Durge struggled to fly away with all of its strength. It might have been able to disrupt the effect with Disjunction, but that would also dispel its own floating spell. It couldn’t run the risk. 

“Stop it!” Durge pointed a claw at Matthew. “Hell or Heaven!”

Ephemeral cards appeared around Matthew, two choices that sought to bind him to a premature death or agony. Neither of those options pleased him. 

So he simply put holes in the pictures. 

The Hell and Heaven spell cards both turned into pitch black holes oozing phantom ink and nothingness. The link of karmic causality snapped utterly with no choices available other than darkness. 

“You said it yourself, existence is meat,” Matthew said. He was oddly at peace with it all as he gazed into the dark star in his hand. Part of him always knew it would end this way. “I would say see you on the other side, Durge… but we both know there isn’t one.” 

“S-stop it!” Durge had never pleaded in the past, so it proved bad at it. “Wait, Wait!”

Durge was so confident when certain of its immortality, and so craven when faced with the prospect of its actual death. How pathetic. 

Matthew closed his eye and waited for the end. The hole sucked in all the warmth in the world, leaving him cold and yet peaceful. At long last, atonement was within his grasp. 

That was all that he deserved. 

“Matt…”

Then he heard her voice. 

His eye snapped open and looked at the source, at the Hydra’s core. Its yellowish surface had changed from a smooth blob to a quivering mass of golden human faces. He counted thousands of them, if not more, a tapestry of human suffering. 

A chill traveled down Matthew’s spine once he spotted her. 

“Matt…” Perse’s face moaned amidst the mass of screaming visages. “Matt… Matt…”

Jack was right.

This place did eat souls.

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