Greg runs to Matt. Matt runs to Greg and Doug to them both. They stop short of hugging. They looked at each other awkwardly, unsure whether to be happy or traumatized by the events that transpired. They all survived. Somehow. But there is nothing to say about it beyond tentative silence.

The silence carries for a while as each sentient skeleton takes it all in their own separate way. The first one to speak would have to take the initiative, and the damn of inaction would be broken.

“Run!” Matt says, pointing at the ceiling. Greg looks up and sees cracks, wide and hungry, across the stone of the ceiling. Greg’s mind goes to the thought of being buried alive, and when he looks for Matt, he is already halfway to the door.

“Boss!” Doug says urgently, grabbing Greg by one boney arm and kicking his feet forward. Skeletons aren’t fast, but the old saying “knees to chest” applies when the room starts to rumble.

If Matt had time he would explain to Greg that this is what seasoned adventurers’ dungeon runs are. The common misconception, he would begin, is that dungeon running refers to running into dungeons-

Slabs of stone and pieces of rock begin to fall behind the skeletons as the dungeon shakes around them.

-But in actuality, Matt would continue, adventurers run out of dungeons as whatever holds them to our reality rapidly collapses when you kill the final boss!

But Matt is too busy running for his undead life to explain to Greg that they have mere minutes before they sink into a hole large enough to swallow a fishing town. Even though Matt wants to say something like, “Why didn’t System say we killed the dungeon boss?” or “Hey, do you remember the void?”

But such concerns are for a different time. When the Necro Party is safe and not barely staying upright as the world around them shifts and falls. For, as they run, the rocks and stones that drop behind them get heavier, shaking the ground and rattling their bones. The cramped world of the dungeon interior, with its cobblestones and barely lit torches, takes on a slightly upward tilt as the ground behind them gives way, and the ground ahead of them barely keeps itself together. The fear of slipping and falling backward into nothing consumes Doug and Greg, while Matt fears a stray rock will collapse his skull.

It is a mad dash, which would be easier in real flesh and bone bodies with tendons and muscles, but instead, they barely outpace the destruction expanding from the dungeon’s center. When they pass the developed dungeon and into the dirt tunnel that led them into the dungeon proper, a scream inhuman and raspy echoes behind them, nearly knocking them over with its force and sheer level of surprise. Greg immediately thinks of the Kapa Boss and imagines him watching in terror as rocks the size of houses fall from the sky. But in actuality, it is way worse than that, as even the false sky collapses around him. The disintegrating dimension tears at him, mind, body, and soul, and wrenches away any hope of staying on this plane. In hell proper, he is but a midnight snake for true demons, and he fears his fate more than the pain.

A fate almost shared by Skelly Boys as they run and run down the dirt tunnel, past the weird eggs that the orcs consumed and the bony remains from Matt’s experiments with Acid Rain. They try not to trip, they try not to slide backward, as, with an exasperated final push, more of stress than actual fatigue, they leap into the night air and escape the big “woooof” of imminent collapse as the dungeon becomes no more.