I showered, grabbed a beer, and sat on the couch.
Having done so dozens of times between Daisytown and home, I pulled up my system profile:
Dorion Carmino
Class: Archer
Level: 4
XP Progress: 119/800
Str: 6
Dex: 10
Con: 6
Int: 3
Cha: 3
Abilities:
- Piercing Shot
Traits:
- Ranged Accuracy
- Improved Reload
- Sharpen
Spells: (none)
I still couldn’t believe it. I went through all that and didn’t earn a single point of XP. Not a one. What bullshit.
On the positive side, I survived and did so without bashing my still-healing nose off of something. I couldn’t say the same for my ribs, but the pain had mostly subsided.
The experience, which included my numerous mistakes, was educational when I stopped beating myself up for it. Dungeon goblins were mean, but fighting wild goblins on the surface was a different challenge entirely. Their craftiness combined with a landscape rich with hiding places was nothing like facing a group of them at the end of a dungeon hallway.
The whole drive home, I kept thinking about how much easier that fight would have been if I were a stealth archer. Though I reminded myself that no build was optimal in all scenarios, I still found myself regretting going dex archer. I knew, however, that if I were a stealth archer in a dungeon, I would be kicking myself for not choosing the dex archer build.
If I was ever going to hunt the wilds, I would need to get better at the following:
-Managing my gear
-Reading and understanding terrain
-Identifying signs of monster activity
-Spotting and avoiding traps
-Fighting indoors
-Evading pursuing enemies
Having a party was ideal. If I wasn’t alone, the goblin fight would have ended with the first encounter and been far safer overall. I couldn’t think of anyone I trusted enough to let in on my plan, and if I did know such a person, what would their motivation for hunting the surface be? I couldn’t tell them about the Unsung Heroes, so they would have no incentive whatsoever to go through the trouble of fighting monsters for no loot and no XP.
At some point in my endless inner dialogue, I fell asleep.
“Dor,” Beth said softly, shaking my shoulder. “Dor.”
I opened my eyes. I was still upright on the couch, and she stood over me in her work clothes. Her arms were crossed, and her face was hard.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“Where’d you go today?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Beth sighed and rolled her eyes. “You made me turn on location-sharing, remember?”
Did I mention I was an idiot? “So you know,” I said.
“I know you were out in the middle of nowhere all day. I don’t know why.”
Clearly, I needed to start dumping points into intelligence. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Do your best.”
“I was monster hunting,” I admitted.
“Huh?”
“Monster hunting.”
Intense confusion joined her serious expression. “...Why?”
“There are some good jobs I could aim for, but they want people with experience in the wilds. I won’t be able to do that for a while, but I can get some practice around here. The wilds are just as much ruins as they are wilderness, so I figure the skills will transfer.”
“Who went with you?”
“No one.”
“Dorion. What the heck? That’s so dangerous.”
“I know.”
Beth sat down on the couch next to me. She smelled like beer from her shift at Milly’s. “I can’t believe you would risk dying. If I didn’t have your location and something happened, I’d never know what or where. You’d just never come home again.”
“There’s money in this path. It’s dangerous, but so is crawling. Right now, I’m risking my life in dungeons to either make zilch as an independent in five years or to sit behind a desk at the CDM for the rest of my life.”
“I didn’t think wild monsters had harvestable mana crystals.”
“They don’t.”
“Then where’s the money?”
“In the positions I can get down the road,” I said. “I’m not giving up on this yet. I know it makes you worry, and I’m sorry to do that to you, but this is important to me.”
“Is what you’re doing legal?”
I shrugged. “It’s a gray area from what I can tell.”
“So you went out there to hunt. How did it go?”
“I have a lot to learn. I lived, and I think I full-cleared a goblin nest. That makes me feel pretty good for some reason.”
Which wasn’t a lie. I did feel good about killing a bunch of goblins and living to tell about it. The part of that summary about what I learned was as far into my ineptitude as I wanted to go.
Beth dropped her face into her hands. “You went after a whole nest by yourself?”
“I’m an archer, remember? I can kill from a distance.”
“If I can’t stop you,” Beth began, “can you not hide it from me? Tell me where you’re going and when you’ll be back. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I can do that.”
“Thank you.”
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” I added. “It might not be illegal, but it’s definitely frowned upon.”
Instead of replying to me, Beth stood and went to the kitchen. “I’m making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Do you want one?”
“Uhh. Sure.”
“I’m liking bartending,” she said. “I’m terrible, but I’m getting better.”
“That’s good.”
“It will be a nice skill to have, I think. One of the line cooks was saying today how bartenders make a ton of money at downtown happy hours. It’s a lot of old rich dudes showing off to their friends by chatting up the cute bartender, so getting one of those jobs eventually might be good.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“I didn’t know that, but it makes sense when you explain it.”
“I don’t think I want to go to school.”
Beth returned to the living room and handed me my sandwich on a plate. She sat next to me again.
She continued, saying, “I like actually working. I don’t want to go sit inside a classroom and pretend for four years. Knowing that a degree didn’t help you or Nathan makes me even less interested, you know?”
My mouth was full of sticky bread, so I nodded.
“I don’t know what I want to do instead yet,” she said.
“And that’s okay.”
“Not having a plan bothers me.”
I laughed. “We’re definitely brother and sister.”
“Thank you for being encouraging and supportive.”
“Of course.”
Beth stood and took my empty plate. “I won’t tell anyone about you hunting, but please be careful. I don’t want to lose you again.”
On Monday, I finished the scanning project close enough to 5 p.m. that Grensmith just sent me home. I didn’t find any more highly classified documents, but I did learn from an old CDM training manual that internships like mine used to be twelve months instead of six. Every intern got six months of enforcement training and six months with the investigation team. Now interns did one or the other, not both.
I reported to my old desk on Tuesday. Megan and Saito were the only interns not in the field that day. Saito welcomed me back, and Megan offered an uncomfortable hello and nothing else, which was strange for her. Megan usually greeted me like we were friends because I thought that’s what we were: friends. If I hadn’t done anything wrong, the source of the problem could only be one other person.
Nathan.
I told him not to make this weird for me. Megan and I worked well together.
Or we did, rather. Now that she associated me with my roommate, I couldn’t undo the damage. She would be promoted in a few months, I told myself. I could survive the awkwardness until then.
Nathan and I were still going to talk about this. Sometimes dates went bad. Fine. But give me a heads-up before you let me spend eight hours elbow to elbow with the aftermath.
Enforcer Chapman intervened.
“Saito, Osheski, I need one of you.”
“Enforcer Grensmith has us on a project.”
Chapman looked at me. “How fast can you type?”
“One hundred thirty words per minute.”
Her head tilted. “Can you take notes?”
“I’d say so. I was going to teach high school English before I joined the CDM.”
“Are you on an assignment already?”
I shook my head.
Her eyes narrowed as she thought. “Okay. You’re with me today.”
Megan cast me a sideways glance as I shimmied out of the cubicle to follow Enforcer Chapman but didn’t say anything otherwise.
Saito whispered, “Good luck.”
I had to hustle to catch up. When I did, Chapman said, “I have several meetings today, and my assistant would usually take notes. She called off, so you’re in the seat now.”
“Am I transcribing, or is it more like class notes?”
“Class notes. I need the information, not the exact words. Can you handle that?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No talking in these meetings, and anything you hear is privileged. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Wait here.”
She left me standing outside of her office while she went in and closed the door. Ten minutes later, she emerged with a laptop bag and handed me one of my own.
A brief drive later, we stepped into a conference room in a downtown hotel. Ten chairs and a few tables were arranged in a square. Each seat had a name tag and someone sitting behind it, all people I didn’t know, but I did know the guilds and teams they represented.
The guilds:
-Buttymen
-Homestead Strikers
-Dungeon Industries Inc.
-Allegheny Dungeon Extractors
-Dungeon Delvers Guild, Pittsburgh Chapter
And the teams:
-The Furious Few
-Mill Rats
-Iron Crawlers
These were the biggest outfits in our region.
Chapman leaned in and spoke softly to me, “These are all operations and compliance people.”
So administration, not active crawlers.
“Sorry for making you wait,” Enforcer Chapman said. She pointed to where she wanted me to sit next to her at the head of the table. “I had to kidnap an intern.”
The people around the table chuckled.
When Chapman and I got our laptops open, she interlocked her fingers and started the meeting. “Thank you, everyone, for attending the quarterly compliance forum. I think this is the first time we have had perfect attendance. I know that’s not good news, so let’s get into it.”
The woman behind the Furious Few name card began immediately. “Why are you beating us to death with silly citations?”
Every other head in the room nodded that they wanted that question answered as well.
Calmly, Chapman answered, “The yet unidentified crawlers who attacked the occupied gates in other states are still at large, and CDM leadership felt that was proof our current enforcement procedures were ineffective.”
“Punishment, in other words,” the same woman said.
“The CDM’s mission is to protect innocent people from the dangers of dungeons. We failed. Civilians and civil servants died because several crawlers felt they were above the law and above human decency.”
I found it interesting that Chapman thought of crawlers as being a part of the threat dungeons posed. While I agreed with that logic, crawlers weren’t mentioned in the CDM mission statement. I know because I had to read it in four hundred different training modules:
Our mission is to protect the public by closing dungeon gates through any means necessary.
That was it.
A shorter man with the Homestead Strikers said, “None of our crawlers had anything to do with that. It’s not fair to punish everyone.”
“We are on high alert until the crawlers are identified. I didn’t decide this, and I can’t change it. I suggest we move on to more actionable topics.”
Everyone grumbled amongst themselves.
A bald man with a gray mustache and a fancy suit spoke on behalf of the Allegheny Dungeon Extractors. “I’d like us to talk about noise ordinances. Limiting our ability to harvest overnight forces more to happen in the day, which means people are rushing instead of prioritizing safety. If dungeon harvesters could be exempt from noise restrictions, we could work through the night and spread out the work.”
Unsurprisingly, that statement saw unanimous agreement as well. Everyone in this room ultimately made their profit from harvesting, after all.
“I’ll include your suggestion in my post-meeting report, but you should know that other states are increasing the restrictions around how much noise a harvest site can generate, and not just at night.”
“You’re not serious.”
Chapman nodded. “I am. There’s nothing official for us yet, but knowing your concern might deter the higher-ups from moving forward with it. What else?”
“We need a rule clarified,” a man from the Buttymen said. He wore blue jeans and a button-up. “We got cited for having hazardous materials stored too closely to a gate. Then, when we followed that directive, we got cited for storing them too close to residences. With how tight some gate locations are, how do we stay in compliance with both distance requirements simultaneously?”
Chapman accepted a folder he passed over. She briefly flipped through the documents and said, “Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I will get you an answer.”
The bald man from the Allegheny Dungeon Extractors asked, “What steps are the CDM taking to prevent dungeon campers from blocking gate access in the future?”
“We do not have infinite resources, so while we’d like to deploy security to every gate C and above, we don’t have the budget or the manpower.”
“Okay. So what are you doing?”
“We are increasing the severity of the crime. Bigger fines, more jail time.”
“That’s not going to protect the gate rights we pay good money for.”
“There is no evidence to suggest that gate camping will be an ongoing problem,” Chapman said. “Yes, there were several all at once, but the CDM believes it was an anomaly.”
“Anomaly or not,” the man countered, “The same measures that would prevent campers would also prevent crashers. We had crashers in five C-ranked gates this quarter. That’s absurd.”
The woman from the Furious Few added, “There are rumors the independent teams are just killing crashers.”
Chapman sat up straight and recoiled slightly. “What kind of rumors?”
“It’s just going around. Can’t really know if that’s happening or not, right?”
That was true. There wouldn’t be a record of the crashers ever having gone in. If your party came in behind the crashers, no one would know that you killed them because their bodies and any potential evidence disappeared when the gate closed. The CDM was using fines as a deterrent, but knowing that crawlers were murdering crashers was a far more compelling deterrent in my mind. Furthermore, a dead crasher couldn’t go on to crash more gates.
To be clear, I have never believed that killing crashers without provocation was acceptable. I’m just saying that I understood the motivation of the crawlers who did.
“Has anyone else heard this?” Chapman asked, looking around the room.
All of the heads nodded.
“Everyone? Really? How many of you think these rumors are legitimate?”
Every crawl team present raised their hands. One guild joined them: the Buttymen.
Chapman paused for a moment, leaving the silence to hang. “I know the reputable operations represented in this room wouldn’t stoop to that, but it would be very helpful if you helped discourage it. Remember that harvester safety standards didn’t apply inside dungeons for many, many years. But the loss of life was too big to ignore, so in came regulation.”
“Are you suggesting crawlers would be regulated during crawls?” the woman from the Furious Few asked.
Shrugging, Chapman answered, “I’ve been doing this a long time. As soon as a problem is too big to ignore, a whole new book of rules and procedures goes into effect. That’s just as bad for you as it is for me. Rampant murder will make all of our lives harder and pile on more work.”
If I had this thought, then I suspected others in the room did as well: Rumors weren’t problems. Until it was confirmed that crawlers were killing crashers, nothing would happen. After so long, crasher murders would stop because there wouldn’t be any crashers left to kill.