She stopped.
“What?”
“I’m like ten feet away.”
“Okay?”
Sighing, she started walking toward my car again. “I can smell you from here.”
“I’ll leave the windows down,” I said.
“I’ll survive,” Beth replied. “Thanks for picking me up.”
“How was work?”
“Men are annoying.”
“Yeah, that sounds right. Everything okay?”
Beth laughed. “Yeah. It’s nothing new. I expected it to be worse, to be honest.”
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I asked, “What do you mean?”
“I guess you didn’t grow up hearing that every man outside of the church was a hopelessly horny feral monster. I was bracing to get mobbed by a pack of wild dogs, basically.”
“That was actually something I agreed with them on. It’s not that bad?”
She looked out the window at the city slowly passing by. “Do you remember where your doubts started?”
I needed a second to adjust to the topic change. “I was in Bible study, and I felt like I was reading a different book from everyone else. That was a small crack at first, but it grew pretty quickly from there. Why?”
“I was fourteen or fifteen. They separated the boys from the girls, and we spent a whole day of Sunday school talking about lecherous, worldly men. All lechers were dangerous, but the most dangerous were the ones who spoke sweetly and hid their true desires until the moment they attacked. Miss Curvin–I don’t know if you remember her–said that you ‘can see the evil in their eyes. Their lust. Their hunger. The truth that you are not a person to them but an object to be used.’”
“I remember her.”
“So, I started paying more attention to the eyes of men around me.”
“Ah.”
Beth sighed. “It’s not like it was every man, but the number surprised me. Too many of them were elders or deacons. That’s where my questions started.”
The way ahead was blocked by cop cars, a fire truck, and two ambulances. Must have been another bar fight. I pulled down an alley onto a side street that was technically two-way, but a few dozen cars had invented parking spaces, narrowing it down to one. We had to stop and reverse three times while I looked for a place to put my own car.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you back then,” I said.
“I hated you for a few years,” she admitted.
Those words inspired a dull, heavy pain in my chest.
Beth continued, saying, “You left us. You left me. I was so angry that my brother would betray us all like that. It took me a while, but I get it now. I know you would have taken me with you if you could have.”
“I didn’t mean to dredge that all up for you.”
She shook her head. “It’s okay. That’s just why I mean it’s nothing new. The eyes are the same, and a part of me is grateful that some are brazen. It’s still awful, but I prefer that to walking in on a bunch of old men talking about what a great ‘vessel’ I was growing up to be.”
“Ick.”
“How’d the crawl go?”
“Ran my first D gate,” I said as I wiggled into a parking space four blocks away from the apartment.
“Was that scary?”
Laughing, I admitted, “Very. I was level 2, and most people say to be level 5 before you run Ds.”
“Past tense? You gained a level?”
With my arms full of gear and Beth waiting on the sidewalk for me, I slammed my trunk shut. We started to walk home.
“I’m level 4 now, actually,” I said.
Beth nearly knocked me into the street with a hip bump she was so excited. Then she grimaced at the goop soaking into her clothes where we touched.
“Do I want to know what I got on me?” she asked.
“Probably not.”
“Well, I’m still happy for you. Congratulations. It seems like you’re making a lot of progress for how hard leveling is supposed to be.”
“Hasn’t felt very fast to me. A lot of people say level 5 or 6 is the big slowdown, though. You need 1,600 XP to go from 5 to 6, and then 3,200 to go from 6 to 7. The next leg? 6,400.”
“I’m still proud of you.”
“Thanks,” I replied, unable to hide my smile. Hearing a family member say those words affected me more than I expected. It brought a warm comfort that felt new yet distantly familiar and left me longing for more of that comfort.
“Oh! Did you hear about the B gate standoff?”
“I caught some of it before I got called in. It had only just started.”
“It’s still going,” Beth said. “Folks at work were saying groups in Texas and Utah are talking about following the example.”
“Hopefully that doesn’t happen. A lot of people will get hurt if there’s a B-ranked dungeon surge.”
As we climbed the stairs to the apartment, Beth added, “They kind of have a point, though. The gate is on their land.”
“My opinion is they want it both ways, and that’s not possible.”
“What do you mean?”
“That group in Butler? They can’t clear that gate themselves. There’s not even a chance they could pull it off. They want the good part of dungeon gates, the profits, but if there’s a surge, they’ll expect the government to protect them. This kind of thing has played out in different forms several times over. The same people who cut funding for dungeon management are the ones who cry the loudest when a surge destroys their town.”
“Ah. So it’s more like a hostage situation.”
“How so?” I asked, curious if her explanation matched Nathan’s.
“If they don’t get what they want, innocent people get hurt.”
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
“Yeah, Nathan said something similar. It’s a good point.”
We stopped talking when I keyed my way into the apartment. Nathan had another early side job in the morning. Neither of us wanted to disturb him.
Beth told me goodnight, and I stepped beneath the glorious luxury of a hot shower and watched inker and beaker juice swirl down the drain. While I enjoyed the warm water, I opened my system. I had two levels' worth of new unlocks to choose from and three stat points to allocate.
My previous unlocks were available as well, if I wanted either of them.
I had my build set in my mind, so Power Draw and Hold the Line weren’t applicable for me, but it was nice knowing that not picking something didn’t make it disappear forever.
For advancing to level 3, I was given the following options:
Improved Ranged Accuracy
Class: Archer
Type: Trait
Cooldown: None
Duration: Perpetual
Increase your base ranged accuracy by 10% and increase your melee accuracy by 5%.
Farshot
Class: Archer
Type: Trait
Cooldown: None
Duration: Perpetual
Increase your ranged attack distance from 60 ft to 90 ft, enabling you to fire with the same accuracy for an additional 30 ft.
Sharpen
Class: Archer
Type: Trait
Cooldown: None
Duration: Perpetual
The chance of your arrow ignoring armor is increased by 5%.
And then for level 4, I could pick from:
Stun Shot
Class: Archer
Type: Ability
Cooldown: 15 seconds
Duration: 2 seconds
Your next arrow inflicts Stun on the target, preventing them from acting.
Piercing Shot
Class: Archer
Type: Ability
Cooldown: 15 seconds
Duration: Instant
Your next arrow passes through one enemy and continues in the same trajectory and with the same force. If a Piercing Shot hits one enemy and then another, that second attack is treated as an independent attack and is subject to all the same bonuses and effects as if it were a typical attack.
Bleeding Arrow
Class: Archer
Type: Ability
Cooldown: 15 seconds
Duration: 5 seconds
Your next arrow inflicts Lesser Bleed on the target, damaging them over time. Bleed effect stacks.
Level 5 would be my last round of base unlocks. Level 6 and onward, most of my options would have prerequisites. That made it sound like these two selections would be less stressful, but since I had a build in mind, every choice was a setup for meeting prerequisites later. The ability options I had presently, for example, could eventually have no cooldowns whatsoever if I made the right choices.
I had two paths to choose from for my dex build: I could take Piercing Shot which was most useful in high-volume encounters, or I could take Bleeding Arrow which was most useful against fewer enemies with higher health. The former was ideal for lower-level gates, and the latter was ideal for higher-level gates and all bosses in general.
Stun Shot was for a Power build, so that was off the table. Farshot was for a Marksman build, so that was out too. Whether I went Piercing or Bleeding, Improved Ranged Accuracy and Sharpen could both be useful, and the guides were torn on which to recommend. Some guides argued that more accuracy was always good, and the ability to more precisely hit exactly what you intend to hit was akin to having to Sharpen since you could strike with more precision.
Other guides argued that anything that could be trained manually was a waste of an unlock. I could practice to manually improve my accuracy, but no amount of practice would make my arrows more likely to ignore armor.
I agreed, but I also didn’t have the time or money to go to a range or seek out an instructor. In theory, I could learn to be more accurate, but when would I actually have the chance to practice?
Eventually, I found my way to the kitchen. I stacked two pieces of cold pizza and ate them with one hand while I made the couch up with the other. In my mind, I continued to debate exactly what I wanted.
When I was a level 1 nothing, Bleeding Arrow seemed like the obvious best choice. Of course I wanted to be more effective against the strongest monsters, but after having done a few runs, better crowd control seemed far more appealing.
Something the streamer LootLootLouis said in passing one time came to my mind: “Worry about not dying today before you worry about not dying tomorrow.”
That was the insight I needed. I chose Sharpen and Piercing Shot, and then I allocated 1 point to strength, dexterity, and constitution. I had spent my stat points for level 3 in the dungeon already.
In my runs so far, I didn’t miss very often because enemies were plentiful and weren’t far away. That made me more comfortable with the idea of honing my own accuracy with practice, and the plentiful part made Piercing Shot worthwhile.
If even a few individual arrows did the work of two, I could have hit several more monsters and conserved ammunition in the squid dungeon.
I made my choices and admired my 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 was starting to look like a proper, capable crawler. That D gate was tough, but the improved XP made me want to run another as soon as possible.
The CDM sent an all-staff email early that Sunday morning asking all employees to be in the office by noon. The email didn’t say why, but the real-time coverage for the Butler standoff reported that the situation was ongoing, so I guessed it had something to do with that.
Nathan was gone, and Beth was still asleep. I slipped a note under her door and went into work.
No conference room in the building was large enough for a true all-hands meeting, so they had us all meet in the lobby, an atrium design with two floors and a set of stairs in the middle. I hadn’t realized how large the Pittsburgh office for the CDM really was until I saw what felt like a concert crowd crammed into one room. I spotted Megan on the outer edge and wiggled and shimmied my way over to her. She leaned against a planter with a tall cup of tea in one hand and an unopened Nad-Nade energy drink in the other.
That looked like overkill at first glance, but a second glance at her haggard, tired face told me maybe it wasn’t.
“Don’t judge me,” she said when I approached. “I got called in for a run last night. Only had a few hours.”
“Yeah, same.”
“Some people online are saying the CDM and the big guilds are planning to force-close the gates. Basically, a high-level party will run in while SWAT and whatever create a distraction.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“The bigger consensus seems to be a National Guard deployment,” Megan added.
That seemed more likely to me. Gate protests like this had happened in various forms over the years. If the group didn’t surrender peacefully, police or military action was the inevitable conclusion.
Smelling Megan’s tea made me wish I had stopped for one on my way in. A little caffeine sounded really nice about now.
“May I have your attention, everyone?” a man standing on the stairs called. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Kamil Akinwale, and I’m the Chief Director for the Pennsylvania CDM. I oversee all of the regional offices and am the liaison for the national CDM.”
I had never seen Chief Director Akinwale in person before. He was older than I imagined, but that may have been because he looked so tired. He had bags under his eyes, and his dark skin had an ashen luster.
He continued, “By now, you’re all aware that we are seeing gate blockades around the country. The effort looks more like copycats than something coordinated, but the problem is no less serious.
“Fifteen minutes ago, this problem got worse. An unidentified crawl team in Texas killed twenty-three civilians blocking access to a C gate. Guilds and teams in Chicago, Baltimore, and New York are threatening to do the same. The Texas gate was relatively remote, but these other gates aren’t. A lot of people will get hurt if crawlers pick a fight in the middle of a city.
“This situation is evolving rapidly, so please check your email regularly for updates as this continues. Presently, Pennsylvania is under a state of high alert, and everyone should consider themselves as being on call until this is resolved. All CDM staff are to have their kit with them at all times to respond to a dungeon surge. We hope it doesn’t come to that, but we need to be prepared.
“Any B, A, or heaven-forbid S gates that open will be proactively secured by CDM staff and law enforcement, both state and local. In addition to gate security, we may need additional cullers to manage unclosed gates, and we will definitely need more people managing our helplines. People are scared and have lots of questions. Part of doing this right is keeping civilians from getting spooked and making this worse.
“Your individual department heads will give you specific assignments. When I dismiss you, please make your way to your usual desks and offices. While you wait for further instructions, anyone who has contacts with members of a guild or crawl team, please reach out to them and encourage calm. If someone discloses knowledge of crawlers preparing to act against a blockade, report it to your manager immediately.
“Thank you for your service, everyone. With your help, we can keep our state safe. That’s all I have for now. Be smart out there, you hear?”
https://www.patreon.com/c/marshalcarper