Chương 107: CDM 2, Chapter 43: Career Advice

"Merry Christmas," Cortez said. He set a Nad-Nade on my desk in the RAID room. Enforce de Saint looked at it longingly.

"Thank you. Merry Christmas to you as well." Cortez gave me a little salute. When he turned to hang his coat, I slid the drink to de Saint. Thinking about drinking Nad-Nade still made me queasy.

"No Army?" I asked, not seeing Dr. Guld or one of his colleagues in the room.

"Alright boys," de Saint began.

"Let me give you the handoff update so I can get some sleep. The Army doesn't need RAID anymore now that their operation is over. We might still get a call from someone on the ground, but they're dealing with all the bodies. Don't need a drone for that. You'll see we've also pulled some of the drones off the S gate and put them back in a normal rotation. Lastly, we don't have any active feeds right now."

"Active feeds" was shorthand for any drone cam that warranted close monitoring. If a drone had spotted a goblin, for example, de Saint would have flagged that as an active feed so we knew to watch and what to watch for. De Saint waved.

"Merry Christmas." When she had gone, I asked Cortez, "Have you kept up with the stream?"

"Yeah. You haven't missed anything. The respawn mechanic is wearing them down, and the puzzle is starting to frustrate them, I think. Oh! One of the rooms had lower gravity, and another had higher gravity."

"That does sound cool," I admitted.

"Gray," Enforcer Chapman shouted across the RAID room, which was very unlike her. The stress of multiple overlapping crises would beat anyone down. Her last full night of sleep was likely a distant memory.

"Dempson asked for you."

"Yes, ma'am." I was unreasonably excited that I got to go to a different floor. Anything that wasn't the RAID room was like a field trip. Where I was didn't really matter. I only cared about where I wasn't: my desk. Dempson's office was empty. I found him in a conference room with two other investigators I hadn't met. I gently knocked on the door before I opened it.

"You asked for me, sir?" Addressing the investigators, he said, "We'll pick this up in a bit." They took the hint and left Dempson and me alone in the conference room.

"I won't keep you, but I wanted to say 'good work' in person. We flipped a decent rock. The harvesting outfit we're looking at serves most of the teams in the city and sometimes subcontracts for the big boys. These wiseguys didn't have the chance to delete everything, thankfully, so we actually got a good bit of material out of a warrant this time."

"That's great news."

"I spoke to Enforcer Chapman already, and she said you would have a good bit of downtime between now and the close of the gate. I know better than to walk away from a hot table. Interested in taking a look at what we got?"

"I'd be happy to, sir," I answered.

"A lot of the material is for the forensic accountants to look over, but maybe you see something interesting. I'll send the link to the drive. Good hunting."

"Thank you."

"Before you go," Dempson called as I reached for the door.

"Can I ask you something not related to the case?" My internal answer was "Oh God, please no." My external answer was a head nod.

"You know this job is a long race, right? You need to pace yourself."

"I don't understand."

"People around here, especially us old timers, well, we notice things. We've got a bunch of young bucks who are busting their asses and doing great, but you're pushing even harder."

"I'm okay."

"What is it you're aiming for?" A top-secret CDM team called the Unsung Heroes. Also, please tell me what they actually do.

"I don't know what I'm aiming for," I admitted.

"I guess I'm trying to be a lot of places. Maybe I'll get lucky and one of them will be the right one."

"You took a trip to Asia recently, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you enjoy that?"

"Very much." This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Which part?" I thought.

"I like hunting, and I like crawling. I loved being in the wilds. I was terrified the whole time, but I loved it." Dempson chuckled.

"You're not afraid to dive in, but in case no one has warned you, I have to tell you that Enforcer McDouglas has a… unique approach to his work. Throwing you undercover at level 5 with no training whatsoever? A lot of people disagreed with that move, but that's how he operates.

"He's got a heart of gold and is one of the most loyal people you'll ever meet, but he's dangerous. He won't coddle you. He'll put you in the driver's seat and push the car down the hill. If you don't feel ready to get in the car, don't get in. You hear what I'm saying to you? Bravery is sometimes foolishness in a nice coat."

"Yes, sir. Thank you for the advice."

Simply opening the drive for the black market files got my eyes to glaze over. I wasn't even looking at a document yet. The quantity of icons alone put me in a state of dread. There was so much to look at, and every starting place was the wrong one. I tried looking over a few spreadsheets, forcing myself to read line by line, but no matter how long I stared, it was still gibberish. Since my process led me to the dragon toads, I fancied myself a budding prodigy, a natural-born detective. That was incorrect.

I had no clue what I was doing. Having no other ideas, I went file by file, reading anything where I actually understood what the words meant. Invoices. Purchase orders. Meeting minutes. Vacation requests. The employee handbook. I hoped something might stick out to me, but I knew very little about how businesses operated. I didn't have the background knowledge to know what was unusual and what wasn't. Since this research was optional, Cortez chose not to participate. I didn't fault him for that.

I was the one who volunteered to do this, not him. While my reading slowly progressed, so did the S gate crawl. They were still trying to puzzle out the right combination and sequence of activations to gain access to the boss room. The dungeon was large enough that they hadn't visited every room yet, making it likely that they needed one of those unseen control columns to find the solution. The internet discourse around the crawl had become more interesting than the crawl itself.

The gate would still be open for a few days, but the simple logistics of operating the control columns meant the crawlers had much less time than that to clear the dungeon and get out alive. Two triggers in the correct sequence could end up being on opposite sides of the dungeon, a trek of several hours, potentially. If any of the rooms along the way had been raised and then lowered again, the monsters would be back, slowing the party's travel speed. Furthermore, the crawlers had to exit the dungeon.

If the puzzle was still active when the boss was defeated, they may need to solve it in reverse to reach the gate before it closed. One way to approach this challenge was to split up the party. From there, they could use their radios to coordinate the sequence of activations, but that created several new problems. The party might be unable to fully regroup for the boss fight. Any number of them could be too far away or have their routes to the boss room blocked because of the puzzle.

The spawn reset mechanic meant that a split party had to clear monsters with fewer people. The wrong matchup of monsters and crawlers could be deadly, but having fewer party members for any one encounter also meant that battles took longer. Lastly, a poorly timed button press could instantly kill any crawler not present in that particular room.

In theory, the party could carefully coordinate locations to prevent that from happening, but a single navigation error or miscommunication could be the death of multiple crawlers. Presently, this conundrum wasn't dire, but the clock was ticking.

"I should tell you that I got my official end date," Cortez said, speaking softly so as not to be overheard by anyone else in the RAID room.

"I know the bigwigs sometimes don't share that information with people like you and me. I don't want you to feel like I disappeared."

"Appreciate it. Are you excited?"

"Absolutely. I've talked to a few crawlers who are shipping out too, and some of them are talking about leveling hard in New Eden and then jumping to an Australia contract. That way, they get a steady supply of upper-ranked gates to keep the XP flowing."

"Is that your plan?" Cortez wobbled his head.

"I'm thinking about it. The XP sounds excellent, but if this difficulty trend is real, Australia is the worst place to be."

"Do you think it's moving that quickly?" He shrugged.

"Man, I don't know what to believe. Some people are saying it's not even a real thing, that difficulty will naturally ebb and flow for gates. Other people think the whole issue is fabricated."

"The science seems hard to fake," I said.

"I mean, it's pretty straightforward. We had so many E gates one year, and the next year it changed this much, and then this much, and so on. It's not like there's a calculation. You just put the numbers on a line graph."

"That's true."

"You're nuts for wanting to crawl Australia, to be clear," I added with a smile, "but maybe that's actually the smartest move you could make. You'll have the levels for a more dangerous world while the rest of us have to think about catching up or getting by."

"I had an uncle who always said we had royalty in our blood. Probably full of shi- Probably full of it, I mean.

'King Dante Cortez' does have a good ring to it, though." I laughed.

"King? What are you talking about?"

"Might makes right. If I have more levels than 99% of the population, who is going to tell me no? Just so there's no confusion, you will always have a place in the Cortez kingdom."

"Yeah?"

"Oh, of course, man. I'd hook you up with a cherry gig."

"Appreciate that."

"Least I can do for a friend." The rest of my shift was typical RAID work. Dungeon gates still opened and closed elsewhere in our region, and those gates needed to be monitored and inspected. Truthfully, I was grateful for that. I wanted to pull out a win from the dump of files Dempson sent me, but any excuse that kept me away from that work, even if just for a few minutes, was welcome.

Dempson had warned me about McDouglas throwing me into the shit before I was ready, but giving me these files was something similar. No one trained or prepared me for this. I had to figure it out–or try to, rather–on my own. Sending me undercover was the same, albeit with greater stakes, but Dempson hadn't gone out of his way to teach me the best way to go about this either. Was this an intentional practice, a sort of sink-or-swim philosophy where the deep end was the preferred learning tool?

If you couldn't figure out how to swim, then you shouldn't be here. Whether it was deliberate or not, I hated it. In my previous life, I despised the explanation that "God works in mysterious ways," and now I was in a situation where Dempson and McDouglas worked in mysterious ways. I was beholden to forces I could neither see nor understand. My only choice was to navigate the waters as best I could in the dark. Maybe that's why I liked wild hunts so much.

The objective was clear, and when that objective was achieved, the internet gave me money to watch. Find the monsters. Kill the monsters. Get paid. Lather, rinse, and repeat.