Orange barrels and caution tape marked the area as crawler-only at one point, but locals moved them to open up more parking spaces, turning the twenty-yard minimum buffer around the gate into a few feet.
That happened a lot, I learned. When it came to parking spots, the streets had their own laws. Fighting them as an enforcer usually wasn’t worth the effort.
Two CDM SUVs blocked traffic in either direction. A single red light spun on the roof of each of them. We parked, and Grensmith lingered after he turned the engine off. No one had talked the fifteen minutes it took to get there. Megan and Saito stared out their windows with pale faces and grim expressions the whole way, so I already knew this wasn’t going to be a good day.
Grensmith had been with the CDM for thirty years and had a reputation for being strict and heartless. If he needed a moment to brace for what was ahead, could I handle what I was in for?
“Put on your plastics and grab a weapon from your kit,” he said.
Slamming the door behind him, Grensmith walked the few feet to the gate to confer with an older woman carrying a radio in one hand and a cellphone in the other. I couldn’t hear what they said.
“If you get sick, find a corner and let it out,” Megan said, weakly. “No one will think less of you, so take the time you need and get back to helping.”
I nodded.
The “plastics” Grensmith referenced were full-body disposable suits. Rubber gloves, boots, masks, and safety glasses completed the ensemble.
The three of us waited alongside the car until Grensmith was done conferring with the woman from the culling team. She stepped away to take a phone call, and he turned to us.
“This is a C-ranked gate,” Grensmith said to us. “Nine of ten wiped. Our job is to ID the crawlers, take detailed notes of their condition, bag their remains, and bring them out of the gate. The investigation team will pick up the bodies and take it from there. Gray, our role here is to back up the cullers inside and to create a chain of custody for the remains coming out of the dungeon. Until we prove otherwise, we have to act as if a crime has been committed here.”
Grensmith slipped plastic booties over his immaculate sneakers and went in first. We followed.
This dungeon had a traditional stone structure. Hewn stone for the walls. Cobblestone for floors. Glowing quartz embedded in the ceiling every five feet for light.
Our feet splashed in blood the moment we came through the gate, and my boots stuck to the floor with each step. Grensmith took several pictures with his phone and then gestured for us to begin. I stuck close to Saito and did what he did.
First we searched for IDs. All of these bodies were hauled here by the cullers, and very few of them were complete. We found most of the IDs with their appropriate owners, but three were missing. A good bit of their bodies was missing as well, so their IDs were likely somewhere deeper in the dungeon. They might never be recovered.
We noted the state of each body. We inventoried their belongings. And we put them into body bags, one piece at a time. Occasionally, a member of the culling team would drag another piece to us and head back into the dungeon.
Technically, this was a task for the investigation department. Enforcers weren’t evidence collectors, but being understaffed and underfunded meant that most people in the CDM did a little bit of everything. The primary investigation teams were already on assignments, so we got sent in to help. That happened often, apparently.
Six cullers eventually appeared from deeper within the dungeon. I took them all for martial types because of the weapons they carried, but the woman with the mace was a cleric, I learned later. That was technically a martial type as well, but most people grouped clerics with healers. They could fight, but their restorative and support magic was what made them useful for a party. I was surprised to see a valuable class like that on a CDM cull team.
A stocky man with white beard stubble stopped to talk to Grensmith while the other cullers waited to exit the gate. I assumed that meant they killed the boss, which triggered the countdown for this instance.
“Gate’s closing in ten,” he said. “Bugbears with a necro shaman.”
“No shit?” Grensmith asked.
The stocky culler shrugged. “Rare but not unheard of. Looked to us like the crawlers fought halfway into the dungeon. When the shaman raised everything they had killed to that point, they got boxed in.”
“Thank you,” Grensmith said.
“Yep.”
With a quick whistle, the rest of the cullers followed the stocky man through the gate. We dragged the last body bag out a few moments later.
Coroners from the investigation team had arrived with vans at some point, and most of the bodies we had recovered were already loaded for transport when we emerged. A muscular man in a suit stood off to the side of the scene, talking with the older woman we met on the way in.
“Everything in the medical waste bin,” Grensmith gruffed. “Disinfect your face and hands before you get back in the car.”
“That guy is the general manager for the Mill Rats,” Megan whispered, indicating the man in the suit. “These crawlers were on his team.”
I knew the Mill Rats. They were one of the larger crawl teams in the city and had a decent reputation. A wipe like this was a tragedy, but it was also very bad for business. Everything the team invested in training and equipping the party was lost. The harvest partners they contracted had already mobilized resources for this gate, but there was no harvest happening now, so that meant more wasted capital. On the media side of the business, fatalities usually meant a drop in followers and a spike in trolls which also meant a dip in revenue.
After a wipe like this, every video and stream comment turned into a dig at the crawl team. A few would express genuine concern about crawling practices that led to that many deaths, but mostly the comments were as toxic as they were twisted.
In the SUV, Grensmith glanced in the rearview mirror to catch my eye and said, “Gray, review proper handwashing procedure when we get back to HQ. I’ll send you the module. Have it done before you leave today. Also, when you’re doing recovery, use two hands to keep pieces from breaking into even smaller pieces. That’s better for the investigators to work with than soup.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“It's Carmino, sir.”
“No, it’s Gray.”
“Yes, sir.” Enforcer McDouglas had made a hobby of spreading my nickname, it seemed.
“Where’d the tenth crawler end up?” Saito asked Grensmith.
“Hospital. The ambulance was here and gone before we arrived.”
“Oh, so she didn’t run.”
Grensmith shook his head. “Not this one. Looks like a straightforward wipe. Don’t get many of those.”
“Umm…” I began, “what do you mean by that?”
“Murder in a dungeon is rarely a person attacking another person. Usually, monsters do the work, and the murderer just makes sure the target is vulnerable at the right time. You put that scene next to a run-gone-wrong? They’ll look the same. What was malicious? What was incompetence? What was bad luck? And then the crime scene disappears.”
“Does that mean there are more dungeon murders than people think or less?” I asked.
“We investigate every death hard as a deterrent. My opinion, murder is a big step for a person to take. I believe in the core goodness of humanity.” Grensmith made that statement with such monotone dryness that I couldn’t tell if he was being serious or sarcastic.
No one talked the rest of the way back to headquarters.
None of us ate lunch–My appetite wouldn’t come back until late the next day, in fact. We didn’t talk in the cube either. When the day ended, goodbyes were little more than head nods.
I was the last to leave. I had three quizzes on handwashing to take.
***
“Late one today, huh?” Nathan asked from the couch when I got home.
“Yeah.”
“Bad news,” he yelled. “Sandra changed the Netflix password. Two years on an ex’s account is a pretty good run, right?”
“Sure.”
Nathan turned. “Shit, man. You alright?”
“Had to clean up a party wipe.”
“Eesh. That sounds terrible.”
“I might just go crash,” I said. “I’m way behind on my sleep.”
“Alright, man. Text me if my shit gets too loud or if you need anything.”
“Thanks.”
After a long shower, I flopped onto my bed. I was tired and sore, but when I closed my eyes, sleep wouldn’t come.
I knew that days like today were inevitable. The work the CDM did wasn’t a secret. I had seen the news reports since I was a kid, I had seen crawlers die on stream, and the CDM interview process addressed the eventuality of a horrific dungeon scene directly with candidates. Death and gore were part of the job. Always was and always would be.
But I believed the dream of getting onto a team or being recruited by a guild gave me a sort of grit to keep going, to face those awful moments in the service of my greater goal. That grit was imaginary, I realized, and the future I aimed for was even more fanciful. If the other interns were right, no team or guild would want a CDM-trained crawler.
Dungeon crawling was my shot at surviving on my own as an adult, though. I might not have “fuck you” money, as Nathan would call being ultra-rich, but I’d be able to move out of this shoebox apartment, and I might even pay off my student loans someday. If I got a crawler job after my time at the CDM, that is.
I needed to confirm if my chances of getting into a guild or onto a crawl team were as hopeless as my coworkers said.
Say that it was. Was the headache worth it if I couldn't get recruited like I planned? I already made the mistake of getting an entire degree before realizing I was traveling in the wrong direction. That was not going to happen again. If crawling wasn’t going to pay off, I wanted to get out now and move on instead of waiting several years to come to my senses.
If it was true that CDM crawlers didn’t get good jobs, I had the following options:
- Cut my losses and bail.
- Aim for a long-term career with the CDM.
- Figure out how to buck the trend and get the job I want on a team or in a guild.
- Find a way to make independent crawling not suck.
Three of the four options required me to stick with the internship and level, so taking my time to solve this was on the table. And there I went doing it again. I wanted to put this off forever and blindly hope for the best.
I knew the lifetime CDM path wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to be a Grensmith or a McDouglas. The job was too much work for too little money.
That left getting a team or guild spot where everyone else failed, somehow making myself the exception, or inventing an approach to independent crawling that made better money than all the independents before me had managed.
I knew too little about either option, and I knew too well that I would never be the exception. People in my family never got the lucky break.
So what the hell should I do?
I gave up on trying to rest and went out to the living room.
“Can’t sleep?” Nathan asked with a mouthful of potato chips.
“Nope.”
“You cool with a LootLootLouis stream? Totally fine if you’d rather not think about crawling.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s fine. Is this a VOD or live?”
“Live. B-ranked orc dungeon. Run started 35 minutes ago.”
LootLootLouis was a spellsword and top 10 crawler from Europe. B-ranked dungeons were a light challenge for him and his party, so they had more freedom to make fights dynamic and entertaining. The lulls between encounters had the friendly banter of an intelligent podcast. Plenty of streamers went the loud and louder route with their content. LootLootLouis was one of the few who didn’t.
But he was exciting to watch. He had thick dreads down to the middle of his back, and he insisted on wearing garishly bright outfits on stream. He sometimes described himself as a court jester with a sword, and he wasn’t afraid to go on stream with a velvety purple bathrobe with pink tights beneath.
As a spellsword, he had to rely on enchantments to avoid the casting penalty for armor. Where most high-level crawlers settled on a look for their personal brand, Louis embraced absurdity. One time, Nathan and I turned on a stream to see him wearing one of those full-body green man suits for a whole run. On another, he wore the jersey for his favorite football team–soccer to us–and white bell-bottom pants.
The crazy part was he made it work. The most outlandish clothing looked good on him. I used to think his dark complexion helped there, giving the bright colors a strong contrast that a pale boy like me could never manage. Nathan argued that it was one hundred percent swagger. Louis was just that confident and cool.
After a few years of watching his runs, I agreed. Louis had an intangible quality to his personality and presence that made everything he did or wore look good.
“Nad-Nade is putting together a crawl team,” Nathan said. Nad-Nade was an energy drink brand. “They’re planning an Asia run, from Poland to Japan in a year basically.”
“Jesus.”
“Right? I don’t care how much money you throw at that. There’s no way that’s happening.”
“I don’t know, man. They’ll send a small army along for an escort and for media.”
Nathan laughed. “Nope. Ten-person team, they said. They're doing all their own filming. No crew.”
“Yeah, not a chance.”
“How much money do you think they’re getting?”
“An absurd amount,” I said without thinking.
Huh. That was interesting. Could an independent crawler get that kind of deal for hunting the wilds, or did I need to be an influencer?