The incline, if you’re not familiar, is essentially a diagonal train car. All of the mills and factories were on the river, but most of the workers lived at the top of an incredibly steep hillside known as Mount Washington.
Back in the industrial era, there were multiple inclines that shuttled workers down to the river and then carried them back up when their shifts were over. A few people still used it to commute today, but now it was mostly a touristy thing to do.
Normally, we would have our pick of two different inclines to ride, but a dungeon gate at the bottom of the second meant that it was shut down until the gate was cleared.
Beth leaned against the railing of the overlook and took in the city. “It’s so big,” she said. “It’s not as scary as mom made it sound.”
“It’s not too bad.”
“Will I like it here?”
“I’m told no city is perfect, but this is the only one I’ve seen. It’s got its rough edges, but I’ve had fun.”
“I don’t want to be a burden. I know, I know. We’re not supposed to talk about that until Monday.”
“It’s okay,” I replied. “You’re not a burden. We’ll get to a point where you definitely need to be pitching in on rent and food, but don’t put that kind of pressure on yourself right now.”
“It’s all so overwhelming, and you did this by yourself?”
“A few nice people helped me along the way, but mostly, yeah, it was me figuring things out.”
“That must have been so hard for you,” she said.
“Sometimes.”
“Thank you for being here for me. I know we don’t really know each other after so much time, but I’m glad you’re still my big brother.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s head back. We can get some lunch near the apartment, and then we can get you a phone. I’ll feel better if you have one.”
As I sat on the couch listening to Nathan trying to explain hockey rules to Beth, I checked my bank balance from my phone. Today had been a splurge to make Beth feel welcome, but for the immediate future she would rely on me for everything. That was an extra person to feed and a bump in utilities to pay.
She barely had any clothes in the backpack she brought with her, so she would need help there. Then she would probably need to buy some required item for whatever job she ended up finding. After that, school supplies wouldn’t be cheap if she went that route.
Stress over finances was an ever-present worry for me, like a guitar string in my chest that never stopped vibrating. And that was before Beth showed up. Now it felt like the guitar string was tied around my heart and slowly tightening.
I was unsure how long I spaced out, but when I looked up, we weren’t watching hockey anymore. We were watching the very first episode of The Wilds: Alaska reality series. It had only been playing for a few minutes, it looked like.
“There’s a lot of blood in this show,” I warned Beth. “Are you sure you want to jump to trying this?”
“I’ll close my eyes.”
“The noises that come with the blood aren’t great either.”
“If I can’t handle it, I’ll tell you.”
I looked at Nathan. He shrugged.
I guess we were going to find out the hard way if she was ready for crawl content.
This first episode wasn’t too bad, at least. The crawlers all met in the city of Vancouver and spent most of the show hyping up the adventure they were about to begin.
Before the dungeon gates, Alaska was part of the United States. The wilderness in the far north of Northern America was unforgiving and sparsely populated even before monsters appeared, but once the gates opened, it didn’t take long for the spawn to grow out of control. All of the major cities were evacuated by boat. Some people stayed behind, of course. In theory, those people could still be in the wilds, living their lives.
Every once in a while, a satellite would spot a hermit living off the land, but those were rare. For all practical purposes, civilization had fallen anywhere north of Calgary, which was roughly a hundred miles farther north than Vancouver. From there, a border cut across what used to be Canadian territories all the way to the east coast. Anything above that line was untamed wilds.
The goal for the show was to travel from Vancouver, up the coast, diagonally across Alaska, ending at Point Hope, which was vaguely near what was supposedly a land bridge between Asia and North America in a distant past.
“These are all top crawlers,” Nathan explained to Beth. “No one is under level 20, and that’s really, really rare. Very few people can earn that much XP in their lifetime.”
“Do they do stuff like this often?”
“There are a few guides who have run the wilds before who accompany them, but none of these crawlers ever have. This will be their first time, and that’s part of the hook for the show.”
“Their gear looks so fancy,” Beth observed.
“Valcuree is the woman holding the longsword. That’s a ten-million-dollar weapon.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. She’s a beast with it too. You won’t believe how good she fights when they finally get out there.”
Eventually, the show ran through a list of monsters The Wilds: Alaska participants were likely to encounter. Since the run began in the spring, any of the spawn incapable of surviving harsh winters had been killed off. A few months into summer, however, and they could run into any monster that appeared in a dungeon. They might, for example, come across the aftermath of a roach gate that surged, or they might walk into an A-ranked boss, like a cyclops or a basilisk.
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The monsters they were almost certain to encounter were built for winters. That included dire bears, frost worms, minor and major yetties, water and earth elementals, a number of wolf-like creatures, and frost drakes.
Most of those could be party-level threats, but frost drakes were the most dangerous. A few crawlers disagreed, arguing that ending up in frost drake territory was good for the run because if a drake was around, it would eat many of the monsters that would otherwise be a threat.
Avoid one frost drake or fight a family of dire bears? Those crawlers believed avoiding a frost drake was safer, but that was only two or three of the crawlers on the show. Every other crawler thought that was absurd. A frost drake could never be good news.
“Is all of northern Canada like this?” Beth asked.
“Do you mean wilds or terrain?” Nathan replied.
“Both?”
“The environment varies quite a bit from what geography I remember, but it’s all tough as hell.”
Beth turned to me. “The church is moving into that? It’ll be that dangerous?”
Nathan cocked his head.
He wasn’t present for that conversation, I realized. “Our old church is moving to Canada as part of a resettlement program.”
After a slight hesitation, Nathan turned his attention back to Beth. “Listen. I install air conditioners. I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m sure the government up there wouldn’t let them go out unprepared.”
Nathan knew as well as I did that Beth was reassuring herself, so neither of us pressed the topic. The show pivoted to an analysis of all the equipment and gear the crawlers were bringing with them.
My phone rang.
“An E gate needs cullers by 12:30 a.m. Are you available?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Thank you for your service. I will text you the address shortly.”
“I have to go,” I said, standing.
“Are you running a gate?” Beth asked.
“I am. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”
“Be careful.” Beth got up and hugged me.
“I will.”
Getting out of the Southside on a Saturday night took so long that I worried I’d miss the start of the run. That was a great way to get my name dropped to the bottom of the call list, and more than ever, I needed to make steady progress toward something worthwhile. Leveling up wouldn’t give me more money to help Beth anytime soon, but maybe in the future I could make enough to give her the freedom to truly pursue what she wanted, whatever that might be.
In the meantime, I would work my way up through the CDM. In six months, when my training concluded, I would get a pay bump, and maybe I'd luck into an early promotion. All of that could happen while I leveled in my off time.
Or something. I was not prepared to be this kind of adult.
This E gate was in the middle of a buffalo farm. Yes, buffalo. I didn’t know people kept buffalo the way they kept cows and sheep. Who bought buffalo meat? Or milk? Could you milk a buffalo?
I mean, could a buffalo produce safe-for-human-consumption milk? All sorts of things made milk that you didn’t want to drink.
And this is what I mean about being unprepared to behave like an adult for my sake and for Beth’s. I nearly drove off the dirt road into a fencepost because I was trying to get a look at buffalo udders in the middle of the night. A serious person wouldn’t do that.
I was the last to arrive, which garnered a level of attention from the other five cullers I did not enjoy.
The captain and the guard were the same ones I had from the Roach Run, but everyone else was new to me. The three other low-level cullers were from the IT department of all places. They were serious about their training, so maybe they were trying to do the same thing I was.
Wiggling between rows of barbed wire, we followed the captain through an open, empty field. Not that his navigation skills mattered much in this case. Someone had laid down a series of little flags to guide us from the road to the gate.
“This is an upper E goblin gate,” the captain said when we stopped in front of a freestanding cave mouth. A fence fashioned from bones blocked entry.
He continued, “This is a run where you get dead for doing something stupid. Take this seriously, though, and we’ll be fine.”
This sounded like my most difficult crawl yet, and I had stat points and an unlock sitting unclaimed in my system. As everyone made their final gear checks, I decided to go dex archer for my build. That big dream of somehow coming into enough money to multiclass would definitely be impossible if Beth was counting on me. I could put that out of my mind completely now.
Following the advice of a respectable build guide, I put 1 stat point into constitution and 2 into dexterity. Then I selected this unlock:
Improved Reload
Class: Archer
Type: Trait
Cooldown: None
Duration: Permanent
Gain a +5% bonus to the speed with which you nock an arrow. All other weapons gain a +2.5% bonus to the speed of their draw.
I reviewed my character sheet:
Dorion Carmino
Class: Archer
Level: 2
XP Progress: 7/200
Str: 4
Dex: 7
Con: 5
Int: 3
Cha: 3
Abilities: (none)
Traits:
- Ranged Accuracy
- Improved Reload
Spells: (none)
For those stat points to have any meaning for you, some context is required. 3 to 5 of any stat was considered average. Most people grew into stats in that range by adulthood.
At 6 to 8, a person appeared trained or exceptionally competent.
The 9 to 12 range still felt reasonably human, but it was obvious the person was far above average.
In sports terms, someone with a stat in the 9 to 12 range was a top professional athlete. They played in the most advanced national and international leagues and were few in number relative to the broader population.
Stats in the range of 13 to 25 started to resemble comic book heroes. Someone with a strength of 18 could lift a motorcycle over their head, while someone with 25 strength could lift a car, for example.
Anything over that? That person was in demigod territory. The rare few that got beyond 35 were walking nation-states. The decision to cross one of those crawlers was akin to deciding to attack a country in terms of the potential violence you could receive in response.
So my 7 dexterity didn’t make me superhuman by any stretch, but I would be more mobile and more accurate than most people. I was content with that for the time being.
As for my build and its long-term viability, dex archer might not be as dynamic as a spellbow, but a few high-level crawlers ran with a pure dex archer build. I could make it work too.
It had to work.
Running E-ranked gates was exciting for me every time, but the actual content of most E-ranked crawls didn’t have the variety or nail-biting battles necessary to make for interesting dungeon stories. The captain said this goblin gate was upper E, which meant a few additional goblin encounters and more goblins per encounter than my first goblin gate.
Other than the extra mobs and my new level, that crawl was no different from my very first E-ranked run. I could, however, feel the change in my dexterity and the effects of Improved Reload. My movements didn’t necessarily feel faster, but they felt smoother, more efficient, and more precise.
Toward the end of the run, I reached back for an arrow, but my quiver was empty. We fought more goblins this run than before, sure, but I most certainly fired far more arrows per encounter. That had to be the case if I was out of arrows.
Though it happened for a positive reason–I improved–running out of arrows during a run felt like stripping naked in the dungeon. I had a backup sword, sure, but I was like a mage with no mana. I could hit stuff, but that wasn’t the role I was supposed to play.
I hoped the CDM quartermasters wouldn’t be bothered by a request for more arrows because now that I was going dex archer, I was going to use a lot of ammunition.