Dungeon Wreckers 69: Belly of the Beast

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Matthew left Ulysses’ home without looking back. Ulysses didn’t try to stop his old friend, and he didn’t take anything with him; not his bag, not John’s gun, nothing but the clothes on his back. 

He didn’t need anything else where he was going. 

Matthew stood outside under the midday sun, gazing at the street. It all seemed so bland all of a sudden without his old home there. Just lifeless asphalt and tasteless suburbia. The feeling of nostalgia this place used to arouse in him was gone, replaced with the void of acceptance. The road was devoid of cars, with not a soul in sight. 

He glanced at the nearest streetlight and spotted a small blue glitch in the fabric of reality; a quick glimpse of a magnetic tape webbing fading in and out of existence without arousing his Doom Sense’s alarm. 

“I know you’re here,” Matthew said. “Show yourself, Tarantulas.”

A short silence followed, with the monster soon appearing atop a streetlight. It looked down on Matthew with his many eyes, analyzing him, knowing him, assessing him. 

“How did you disrupt my camouflage?” Tarantulas asked calmly. 

Matthew immediately picked up on how normal the English sentence sounded now. He detected no broken grammar, no misplaced words, no sign that this monster was only parroting human speech without understanding it. A few days of close contact with the Doc had allowed Tarantulas to master a language that took years for most to truly understand. Even its voice now sounded almost human, if slightly androgynous. 

“I just do,” Matthew replied. His Black Flux had grown out of control enough to disrupt the Doc’s Key, so a spell-like defense like Tarantulas wouldn’t survive long in his presence. “Same way my Black Flux granted you self-awareness, I suppose.”

“So we have reached the same conclusion.” Tarantulas’ head slightly tilted to the side, though not enough for it to be creepy anymore. “You gave me thought. You gave me free will.”

Matthew nodded slightly. “I think I did.”

While all Dungeons showed a degree of intelligence, the only known self-aware monsters were Durge and Tarantulas, both of whom arose from places which Matthew personally visited. He never considered that there might have been a correlation until his meeting with the Doc. If his Black Flux could indeed cause cores to split off from the Hydra and become Keys, then it should have been able to affect monsters too.  

“Why?” Tarantulas asked immediately.

“I didn’t mean to,” Matthew replied with a shrug. “It was an accident.”

“Was it? An accident?” Tarantulas gracefully leaped off the streetlight and landed on the pavement without so much as a sound. “I have observed you, listened to your communications, read your files. You are such a unique entity with powers unlike any of your brethren, surviving where others would have died.”

Oh great, Tarantulas had learned how to sweet talk. Would it ask Articat out to dinner too? 

“You are an anomaly with an abnormal life trajectory. Coincidences could explain some of these swerves and turns, but I wonder… Maybe you were destined to bear this power and in turn, free me from the Hydra’s call.” Tarantulas approached Matthew so closely that they now faced each other. “Maybe you were chosen.”

Matthew scoffed in disdain. “By whom, the Hydra? A higher will?” He brimmed with disgust. “The Mall?”

“That is what I must find out,” Tarantulas said. “I wish to meet our creator. I must understand why I exist. I must understand my purpose, why I am different. The mystery of my existence confounds me, and I must find its answer.”

Tarantulas had grown human enough to suffer from an existential crisis. That or the Doc’s philosophy lessons had stuck.  

“Maybe you weren’t chosen,” Matthew countered. “Maybe it was just an accident or random chance. A twist of fate.”

“Mayhaps, but I must nonetheless ask and confirm this hypothesis.”

Fine. That suited Matthew just as well, since he had plenty of questions of his own to ask the Hydra before it killed it. “I want to access the Mall’s core.”

Tarantulas nodded sharply. “That is why I came to you. The source of all that humans call Dungeons and monsters awaits there.”

“Then show me the way in,” Matthew all but ordered the monster. 

Tarantulas froze for a moment, like a deer in headlights. It seemed genuinely puzzled for a moment, as if whatever program it ran in its head failed to compute the question.

“I do not understand your demand.” Tarantulas pointed a claw at Matthew’s eyepatch. “The path is right there. Can you not open it yourself?”

The question sounded so stupid and was asked with such naivety that it took Matthew’s mind a few seconds to register it. “What… what do you mean?”

“I have analyzed you and your allies closely when you explored my nest, especially when you opened the path to this Mall Dungeon,” Tarantulas explained. “The portal pathway on your face shows the same camouflage system that allowed this Mall Dungeon to disguise its Flux signature when encroaching onto my nest.”

A few confused and half-answers formed on Matthew’s lips, but never materialized. 

Then it finally hit him; why they could never find the access to the Mall’s lower layers, why the Dungeon lingered in spite of being starved of victims, why the hole materialized after Durge cut him open there, why it asked him to open the gate…

“We never escaped that Christmas,” Matthew muttered to himself, his hands clenched into fists as he understood just how thoroughly he had been played. “It let us go. It let us go.”

Tarantulas observed him in silence and provided no comfort. It didn’t need to. Matthew soon calmed himself, his guilt and remorse drowned in a cold, silent rage. 

“You know I’m going to destroy that place once we find our answers,” Matthew warned Tarantulas. 

“I do.” Tarantulas didn’t sound all that concerned. “I do not assume that my creator has our best interests at heart, nor do I request its survival. It has shown us only hostility so far.”

“If you change your mind and get in my way when the time comes, I’ll kill you.” It wasn’t a threat, but a promise. He didn’t trust any smart monsters. “If you don’t…” Matthew took a deep breath. “Then I think the others will take you in and feed you their Flux. You’ll be the monster that helped save the world.”

The Association would always keep a close watch on Tarantulas, especially after it killed some of their members, but he knew human gratitude—and pragmatism—would trump all other concerns. Tarantulas would have saved the world and proved itself an invaluable tool against the Hydra. The likes of Crypto would rather keep him around out of fear that the Dungeons might return than anything else. 

“This possibility is agreeable and your people’s gratitude will be welcome, but I foresee that new and better options will open themselves up to us,” Tarantulas replied, his mandible clicking. “Shall we?”

Matthew knew that Tarantulas had a hidden motive of some sort—of course it had one, it was a goddamn spider—but he didn’t care all that much. Whatever the monster had in mind didn’t trigger his Doom Sense, so it wouldn’t harm him in any way, and their interests were aligned for now. The Mall had tried to consume its own Dungeon and presented a threat to them both. This was an alliance of circumstance.

And that was what made it agreeable to Matthew. He didn’t want any of his friends involved, but he didn’t care whether Tarantulas lived or died. 

“Fair warning.” Matthew’s hand reached out for his eyepatch. “I’ve never tried entering that hole.”

“I am told most humans struggle to enter their own holes.” Tarantulas marked a short pause, waited in vain for an answer, and then tried to elaborate. “That was what you humans call a joke. A human anatomy joke.”

Matthew couldn’t help but scoff. “Punchlines are like punches, Spidey. If they don’t land, they’re wasted.”

“Thank you for your feedback. I was told humans use humor to put each other at ease.” Tarantulas studied him for a moment. “Are you at ease now?”

Matthew pulled back his eyepatch and swallowed Tarantulas whole. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

—-

Entering his eyehole proved easier than he thought. All he had to do was put his hand inside after swallowing Tarantulas and letting himself go. He had always resisted being pulled in out of fear he couldn’t escape it, so his Key always allowed him to escape its gravity. It felt strange, though, like being a cloth unfolded one way into the other or crossing a paper-thin frontier between the real and the unreal. He remembered a flash of white followed by yellow and violet, then the sensation of being flung across an invisible barrier.

One instant he was on the street, and in a casino the next. 

Or at least the Mall’s hidden floor looked like one. Matthew looked around to find himself in a derelict gambling hall with broken pillars and a giant roulette wheel for a floor drowned in debris of shattered stone and candelabras. Golden light filtered through holes in the collapsed ceiling. Dust covered almost every inch of every surface while yellow and purple particles aimlessly floated in the air.

No one had stepped into this place in years. Perhaps more. 

Matthew’s hand instinctively reached out for his missing eye. He felt a hole in reality beneath his fingers, but there was no overwhelming gravity and suction that would have pulled him in once. 

It was never a black hole; just a portal. Had the Mall mimicked his Key to trick him, or did his power still retain a connection to its birthplace? All Matthew could tell was that he had been thoroughly deceived.

There was no sign of the countless Dungeon cores and monsters he had thrown in there across the years, though. Matthew guessed they had long been reprocessed and sacrificed to fuel the Mall’s continued existence. He did spot Tarantulas standing near a wall, facing a set of twisted surrealist paintings. 

Matthew only wanted to reach the core, whose proximity he sensed in the air, but the sight of a few French titles beneath the art pieces caught his eye. Half of them were torn or faded, but three stood out from the rest. 

‘The Genesis,’ showed gloved hands opening a box filled with multicolored potions. A chill traveled down Matthew’s spine once he recognized the same yellow goo that first gave him his Key.

‘The Day of Humiliating Closure,’ showed some sort of purple magician with a top hat holding back a tide of clowns while men and women escaped through a portal. Matthew guessed it represented a Crawler of some sort evacuating victims. 

And ‘The Grand and Honorable Tactical Retreat Through Dimensions,’ showed clowns running into a purple portal and away from the exact same magician. 

“What conclusions do you draw from this?” Tarantulas asked. 

“That this whole mess happened before in a place far, far away,” Matthew replied, his voice brimming with anger. “And this cowardly place fled to pick an easier hunting ground rather than stand up and fight.”

Tarantulas nodded in agreement. “Then this implies that there are universes beyond ours.”

“That surprises you?” Matthew shrugged. Pop culture and years of adventures had prepared him for that discovery. “All Dungeons are pocket dimensions, and you said yourself that the Hydra existed between our dimension and another.”

“I did not think it would be another Earth with its own humans,” Tarantulas said while glancing at the ceiling. “I can carry you.”

Whatever the case, Matthew didn’t bother climbing up on the roof. He simply punched a hole through the wall and to the outside. 

A great yellow expanse streaked with violet lightning sprawled before them as far as the eye could see, and beyond; a void that seemed to go on forever, and where islands of bricks and stone floated aimlessly. They resembled parts of a half-formed casino, yachts gliding across infinity, or many-floored manors with no one to welcome into their halls. A purple star glowed in the distance with more Flux than Matthew had ever seen pouring out of it. 

The Hydra’s core was almost within reach. 

“I can create a bridge of webs between these structures,” Tarantulas said upon pointing at the nearest floating brick island. “But it will take time and Flux.”

“Don’t bother,” Matthew said as he waved his hand and opened a hole in space. “I’ve got an express ticket.” 

His only limitation to creating wormholes between two points in a Dungeon had been the touch requirement; now that Matthew could open holes simply by staring at a point, he simply summoned a hole atop the nearest floating island and stepped through.  

Poor Sasha. Anything she could do, he could do better. 

Tarantulas wisely followed after him as Matthew created set after set of portals between the floating structures. Gravity worked in such a weird way here, with each ‘island’ appearing to project its own field like a mini-planet. No monster appeared to intercept the intruders, and why should any? 

They were just returning home. 

The density of floating objects increased the closer they approached the Hydra’s core. The blob was the size of his entire school, a bloated mass of yellow jelly with purple bubbles for eyes. It pulsed like a beating heart, expanding and contracting with such force that it expelled fragments of goo across the void. 

The different oozes shifted colors from yellow to white, green to blue, all the colors of Flux, and then disappeared in flashes of violet light once they grew large enough. Matthew guessed that he was watching the birth of Dungeon cores. How many of them would survive to manifest into reality or transform into Keys on arrival? 

No matter, Matthew thought as he and Tarantulas walked along the surface of a sideways building. The core would soon become close enough for him to cast his ultimate technique, at which point it would be too late for it to retaliate. This will end very soon. 

His Doom Sense didn’t trigger even as a red beam descended upon them. 

Tarantulas reacted quicker, grabbing Matthew’s shirt and pulling him back. The beam hit the edge of the floating building, shattering bricks and sending glass flying from destroyed windows. Shrapnel narrowly missed Matthew’s face.  

“You must feel really stupid right now, Mathias,” an all-too-familiar voice taunted them from above. “All those poor hominids dead because you couldn’t bear to look at yourself in the mirror.”

Matthew froze with fear and rage upon recognizing the voice. His head snapped up at the source of the beam, at the monstrous creature crawling along the surface of a yacht floating into oblivion far above his head. 

He had been wrong. The Hydra did summon a monster to defend its heart. 

“I’m sorry, my good friend,” Durge said with a mocking tone filled with bloodthirst. “You won’t find a happy ending here.”

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