They held hands in the elevator.


    Matthew stood at the center, squeezing his teammates’ fingers while each of them carried a small firearm on their free sides; in short, the perfect picture of a good American family.


    “This is embarrassing,” Kari complained, her pale cheeks steadily growing redder with each passing second. Her fingers felt like jelly to Matthew, a stark contrast with the tight grip on her gun. “I’m not feeling this.”


    “Honey, you know how much our son is afraid of going to school alone,” John said with a false, dad-like tone. “We have to support him on his first day!”


    Matthew joined in on the joke. “Mom, Dad, can you buy me a new game after we kill all the evil chicken monsters?”


    “I’m no helicopter parent, boy,” John replied sternly. “Run a lemonade stand or work at the mine if you want money.”


    “Is hand-holding really necessary?” Kari insisted. “I’ve never done this with a boy for so long…”


    “My spell will target you too if you let go,” Matthew warned her, his Doom Sense buzzing increasingly loudly as the elevator slowed down. “Also, please kill all the monsters quickly. Their good fortune will come back all at once once my spell ends.”


    John scowled in annoyance. “And you’re telling us that now?”


    “Better late than never, neglectful dad,” Matthew replied as he unleashed his spell. A yellow pulse of Flux spread across the entire floor to jinx it all. “Here we go.”


    The elevator’s doors opened into a factory to the tune of a dozen rifles jamming all at once.


    Matthew’s team would have been turned into Swiss cheese that very instant without his spell. A good dozen shotgun-wielding goblinoid chefs awaited them on the other side of the elevator doors, arrayed in a grand hall backed by banks of poultry cages on both sides of the room. Monstrous chickens the size of rottweilers snapped at them from behind bars with beaks filled with sharp teeth. They struck at the locks holding them prisoners in an attempt to escape and swarm the intruders, but the gates refused to budge due to lock malfunctions.


    Kari and John raised their guns and fired all at once.


    Two things struck Matthew about his spell as bullets started flying like a ballistic flood.


    First of all, casting it cost him a lot of Flux. Matthew felt his humongous reserves quickly plummet with each passing second. He doubted a normal Crawler would be capable of maintaining this spell for more than a few seconds, and it would definitively remain something Matthew would only use to deal in the direst of circumstances.


    Second of all, it was worth the Flux cost and then some!


    Matthew enjoyed a very pleasant view of flying bullets tearing helpless monsters to shreds in an orgy of lead and comical disasters. He wasn’t technically stealing the monsters’ good luck in the sense that he hoarded their own; he simply suppressed all good fortune in a wide area until only calamities manifested within the spell’s radius, the same way he had to suffer misfortune with Lucky Star before he could reap the benefits. The monsters would recover all their lost luck the moment the spell ran out, which made killing them before it did all the more pressing.


    Matthew had grown certain that his Lucky Star’s power depended on its user’s perception, since one man’s luck might be another’s misfortune. In this case, the Dungeon’s defenders experienced a non-stop flow of disastrous calamities: one of Kari’s bullets ricocheted off a goblin chief’s head, slipped between a cage’s bars, and then shot a chicken in the throat; another chicken managed to escape its cage only to fly into another projectile’s exact path; a monster’s shotgun exploded in its hand due to some kind of internal malfunction; and so on.


    It was like watching a gory blooper compilation in real time, which Matthew found pretty relaxing.


    However, all good times eventually had to come to an end and the effort of maintaining the spell left Matthew a bit winded. “Hurry up!” he told his bodyguards. “I can keep it up for one more minute, two tops!”


    “Yes, yes!” John snapped once he ran out of bullets to fire with. Unable to reload with only one hand, he tossed his weapon aside and grabbed a sidearm attached to his leg. “Almost done!”


    Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    Only a scene of carnage remained by the time the bullets stopped flying. A bed of alien black blood and feathers covered the floor amidst a sea of corpses and chickens slain in their cages. Silence ruled amidst the dead.


    In short, the floor now looked no different than an active poultry slaughterhouse.


    “Whoa, that was…” Kari let out a sigh of relief. “Therapeutic.”


    “Glad you’ve enjoyed it, ‘cause I don’t think I can cast it again today,” Matthew replied after letting go of his teammates’ hands and canceling his spell. He felt like a sedentary geek after a surprise and intense gym session, enough to make him stretch his back. “I think I’m going to call it… Calamity Force.”


    “It certainly lives up to its title,” John noted after examining the monsters’ corpses, just in case any of them survived the onslaught; none did. “Do you have enough Flux left to dig a hole in the floor?”


    “I’m insulted that you even need to ask, Misfire.” Matthew was always careful to keep some Flux in reserve to deal with unforeseen emergencies. “Where’s the spot?”


    Kari pointed at a very specific point on the floor, right between a dead chicken and a bullet-riddled goblin chef. Matthew opened a small hole there, which gave the team the perfect view of the treasure room below.


    “Perfect angle,” Kari muttered to herself as she brought out a rope from her bag, tied it into a lasso, and then lowered it down the hole like a fisherman sending its hook into the sea. “I just need to catch it… a tiny bit left…”


    “You’re taking off the dome first?” John pondered out loud.


    “It’s not a dome, it’s a globe,” Kari replied. She managed to put her lasso around the glass orb, then slowly pulled it upward with careful dexterity to avoid triggering the turrets below. “And whatever treasure that orb contains is super light.”


    Kari eventually pulled the glass orb all the way to their floor, and Matthew opened a hole in it to avoid spilling out the contents. A small, neatly folded piece of paper slid out with a whistling noise. Matthew checked the paper to find it sealed with a Major Chicken logo.


    “All this effort for a piece of paper, and it’s not even magical?” John complained, his enthusiasm suddenly deflating. “What does it say?”


    Matthew removed the seal and unfolded the paper. The document listed a highly detailed list of ingredients and the associated quantities, from cocaine-laced ‘extra flavor’ to vanilla spice melded with chicken meat fed on an extremely specific diet.


    It didn’t take long for Matthew to realize what he held in the palm of his hand. His pulse quickened, and his fingers trembled with near-religious zeal.


    “It’s the secret recipe,” Matthew whispered in awe before exploding with joy and holding up the priceless treasure in awe. “I hold the secret sacred recipe in my hands!”


    “The secret recipe?” Kari asked, blinking in confusion as she read the ingredients. “Of what?”


    “The Major Chicken Tender!” Matthew boasted. “It’s the company’s secret recipe, kept in a vault at their HQ!”


    “Oh, so that was the vault which the Dungeon was mimicking.” Kari scratched the back of her head, her unenlightened eyes unable to see this legendary treasure’s true value. “That’s… neat, I suppose?”


    “Neat? Neat?!” Matthew choked in outrage. Was he the only one who studied the company’s lore before venturing into the associated Dungeon? “It’s one of the world’s most guarded trade secrets! Only the company’s CEO and R&D chief are allowed to gaze upon it!”


    “That’s just a marketing plot, Maruki,” John replied with skepticism. “There’s no way they could produce so many nuggets with so few people knowing the recipe. Those tenders are just normal chicken nuggets with better than average publicity.”


    “You know nothing, John.” Matthew took it upon himself to enlighten these two deluded souls on Major Chicken’s history. “There are six secret ingredients for the tender seasoning produced in two secure facilities in Kentucky, where each mix half of those, and then send the mixes to a third factory to prepare the chicken. Ingredients vendors don’t even send identifiers besides lines of numbers!”


    “That’s… a very complex security system,” John conceded. “I find it odd that any fast food company would go so far for a nugget.”


    “One of the secret ingredients is a cocaine-based flavoring, so it would cause a scandal should the public learn about it,” Kari noted. She then gave Matthew a strange look. “I guess that explains a few things about your chicken addiction…”


    “Oh, truly?” John’s expression swiftly shifted from a scowl into a fiendish smirk. “That changes everything! Now we can blackmail the company for money, or sell the secret to the competition!”


    “What?!” Kari choked in indignation. “What happened to earning money the entrepreneur’s way?”


    “Corporate espionage is a perfectly valid business practice,” John replied, his greedy hand reaching for the recipe. “Now gimme that, Maruki.”


    “Nobody shall misuse the sacred recipe on my watch!” Matthew replied as he ferociously kept the holy text away from the heathen. John immediately backed off upon sensing his undying resolve. “No, instead we’ll anonymously ask the company for a modest fee for protecting their employees from a man-eating Dungeon and keeping their secret safe!”


    Kari squinted at him. “So blackmail with a few more extra steps?”


    “Payment for services rendered!” Matthew insisted. “Wouldn’t you rather be paid for risking your life in the great Major Chicken company’s service?! Are you for unpaid labor, Kari?! Won’t you stand up for your rights?!”


    Kari pouted and looked away; a rather eloquent way to say that yes, she would rather be paid for her actions. “When you put it this way…”


    “Color me impressed, we might cut a tidy profit on this one,” John mused. The thought of earning easy money had put him in a good mood for the inevitable boss fight. “Well, chicken boys and girls, I sense a great amount of Flux upstairs. Are you ready to bring down the house?”


    Matthew cracked his knuckles.


    He would leave this Dungeon with its core stuffed in a bucket, or not at all.