Chương 165: CDM 3, Chapter 41: Overkill

Good news: I was right about the giant water moccasin nest in Punxatawney. Bad news: What was a fierce challenge for us before was now brief and unremarkable, which was not ideal when your goal was content for the internet. Shooting voidwood arrows through the crumbling walls of an old farmhouse would have been even more boring, so we agitated the snake until it burst from its lair, angry and ready to strike.

When it snapped its head forward to bite Megan, she hit it with Rapid Strike at the same time I put three arrows in its head.

"Welp," Nathan said over our headsets.

"That fight was almost too short for a GIF, let alone a video." Megan sighed.

"Head in and see if a secret challenge awaits us?"

"Roger that." Kimmy floated inside. There wasn't much of the house left besides an old, hand-dug cellar and a room with a half-collapsed roof cutting it in half diagonally, so the search was brief.

"Question: Can one cook with snake eggs?" Nathan asked. I heard de Saint in the background groaning in disgust.

"I've always wanted to try one of those big ostrich eggs. Or emu. These have to be bigger than those even."

"Anything other than eggs?"

"Negative, Osheski," Nathan replied. I followed her in and started to smash the eggs, doing our part to limit the impact of this invasive species. Nathan argued that he should get to keep at least one to cook with, but Megan insisted that the risk wasn't worth it. We needed Nathan healthy, so we continued bashing them with sticks.

"This could become an issue, huh?" Megan remarked as we walked back to the road where Nathan and de Saint waited for us.

"I think so," I admitted.

"Fights were more exciting when we kind of sucked." Megan laughed.

"The troll in Cinnci could have been boring content if we didn't find the helminth."

"And easy fights aren't helping us sharpen our skills any. If anything, I'm worried I'm backsliding by not challenging myself."

"Maybe we have to go back to the stunt conversation," Megan said.

"If the fights aren't interesting, we could try to make them interesting. Kill monsters in fun, new ways."

"I'm good with being creative when we have to be, but forcing it feels like a slippery slope. We'd have to keep escalating and escalating to keep view counts up." We crossed the railroad tracks and joined Nathan and de Saint at my car.

"Rainy has a content idea," Nathan shared.

"We were riffing on what to do about this being so damn short."

"We were having a similar conversation but didn't come up with any ideas," Megan replied.

"What do you got, Rainy?"

"We could interview a herpetologist about habitat and hunting behaviors, comparing the giant variety of snake to the variety native to Earth," de Saint explained. Nathan leaned in.

"Herpetologists study amphibians and reptiles, by the way." Megan pushed Nathan.

"I know what the word means, dick."

"That fits the documentary angle we used for our troll hunts," I said.

"The video stats say that a lot of people still skip to the fights, but a decent chunk watch the build-up commentary. It's something." Megan nodded.

"Yeah, it helps, but I don't know how many videos we can pad out like that. The videos the channel started with set a bar for excitement that our levels can't accommodate. If we were professional crawlers, we would be running C and B gates exclusively at this level. For wild monsters, a low C-ranked encounter is the best we can hope for, but most of our content will be D unless we find another giant goblin nest."

"On the bright side, Stage 2 looks like it will send bigger monsters our way eventually," Nathan joked.

"Drake and salamander hunts would get views."

"I don't think we should hope for that," de Saint countered.

"Dude, if it was my choice, I wouldn't allow Stage 2 to continue, but it's happening. You know, lemons, lemonade, that whole saying." I checked the time.

"We can still get home at a reasonable hour. Might as well try to get a decent night's sleep." We had been on the road for about 20 minutes when Beth called me.

"Hold on," I said.

"I'm putting you on speaker."

"Good hunt?" Beth asked. When she heard our guttural reactions, she said, "Ah, sorry to hear that. So… I don't know how to present something like this, but Nad-Nade is threatening to pull our contract over the UnderDome photoshoot. We agreed to do collaborations with other Nad-Nade crawlers, and Chrissy says that this instance is very clearly a 'reasonable request.' Refusing it would be a breach of contract, she says."

"Fucking assholes," Nathan hissed.

"We could talk to an attorney and try to fight them on it," Beth suggested.

"That only hurts us," I interjected.

"They've got deeper pockets, and they definitely won't want to work with us again if we go that route."

"What are our options?" Megan asked. Beth answered, "We can do the shoot like they asked. We can agree to let them use body doubles and do the shoot for us. Or we can refuse, and they'll consider the contract void." Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

"UnderDome is so fucking gross," Megan muttered.

"I guess we do the body doubles." I shook my head.

"I'm surprised you're willing to associate the brand with him if that's how you feel."

"Oh, sweet innocent, Dorion. Gross men are everywhere. If I took a do-or-die stand against them every single time, I would have never gotten out of middle school."

"She's right," de Saint echoed.

"Does everyone agree with Megan?" Beth asked.

"I can't see any of your faces to know how you feel about it."

"We want to keep the contract, and we don't actually have to do anything since they offered body doubles," Megan continued.

"I'm fine with it."

"Me too," de Saint added.

"If I get a vote."

"Of course, you get a vote," Nathan spat.

"Get the fuck out of here with that 'if I get a vote' crap." De Saint laughed.

"Beth," I began, "How do you feel about it?"

"I'm with Megan. If we can't bring down the patriarchy, getting them to give us money is an okay consolation prize."

"Then I'm fine with it," I said.

"Nathan's nodding that he's good with it too."

"Sounds good," Beth replied.

"I'll let them know."

"Thanks, Beth!" we all said in unison before she hung up.

"What a disappointing day," Megan mused. I never once imagined myself thinking, "This would be easier if my level were lower," but there I was, lamenting the fact that goblins and trolls had become pests as ordinary as mosquitoes. Nobody liked the blood suckers, but no one was tuning into a YouTube channel that was nothing but killing mosquitoes. I set down my paintbrush and pulled out my phone. We had been painting the guild house for a bit now. A little break couldn't hurt.

Welp, a singular search query proved that wrong. Amongst the plethora of practical videos about dealing with mosquitoes on camping trips or in your backyard were plenty of videos that reveled in the violence of mosquito slaying. Motion-tracking squirt guns that sniped them out of the air. Electrified standing water that fried any mosquito landing to lay eggs. Hand-held bug zappers shaped like tennis rackets.

The goblin equivalent of that content could do pretty well, actually, but that wasn't how I wanted to spend my time. The snowball of absurdity would get old as we looked for more and more extreme ways to end goblin lives, and at a certain point, the entertainment we provided would come entirely from cruelty. Mice and rats were a common problem for any farm, so I had baited and reset my share of traps in my life. Any time I found one still alive, dragging a trap around as it continued to bleed, I felt horrible.

We couldn't let them get into our food or our grain, so they had to go, but the idea of a creature spending its last hours in crippling agony felt like an act of evil. I resumed painting. The base coat for one of the guild house apartments came along nicely, and I didn't hate painting nearly as much as I had hated drywall. I mentally reviewed the SOCs I browsed through a few hours earlier.

Trolls and goblins were relatively plentiful, but those hunts could end up being short and boring, or worse, the sites could already be cleared by the time we arrived. Bugbears, maybe? West Virginia was in a state of emergency over bugbear encroachment, and Pennsylvania had a few bugbear SOCs in the north-central region, where it was rural and mountainous. I had never fought one of those in the wild before, and the EPA op we observed made them look like interesting monsters to hunt.

They also moved around a lot and were adept at disappearing into forests and mountains. A single day to track and clear a tribe of bugbears didn't seem like enough. Ogres, dire wolves, and even leshy SOCs were out west, but the closest of those sites was in Missouri. We didn't have time for a road trip like that either, though I very much wished we did. I had never gotten to fight an ogre on even footing, and I wanted to see how I measured up.

Going after dire wolves and leshys might have been pushing my luck, but I wanted to see what those hunts were like as well. I paused to think when my roller needed more paint. Was I really that certain of my ability to handle that level of monsters, or had paint fumes lowered my inhibitions? Regardless of where that confidence came from, having it felt good. Not that it helped me in any way.

None of those hunts were within our reach, distance being but one of the hurdles we'd face going after a dire wolf or a leshy. Like bugbears, these were monsters who thrived in deep wilderness. Finding them could be nigh impossible even if we had the time and the resources to look. I could reach out to Agent Porter to see if she had any new leads on her Buffalo werewolf. That was a drive but not that much of a drive, relatively speaking.

The legality of hunting an Earth-born werewolf had not yet been clarified, however. The FBI insinuating that killing the werewolf version of trailer park Freddy could be considered murder was still fresh in my mind. I had rationalized it to the point where I felt that slaying a werewolf actively doing harm was justified, but attacking a person solely because they had lycanthropy was not. If Freddy had climbed over that fence in his boxers instead of in werewolf form, we wouldn't have hurt him.

But I was well aware that my sense of values and morality didn't match the public at large. How I felt about killing werewolves didn't actually matter.

"Looking good, Master D," Nathan said, standing in the doorway with drops of paint splattered across his shirt and his pants.

"So I'm doing it okay? I feel like I'm taking forever."

"You should see the pro painters in action, dude. They would have had the whole guild house painted by now. Most of them don't even use painter's tape. They just freeball it because they're that good with brushes."

"Do you think killing a werewolf is murder?" I asked when Nathan didn't continue gushing about professional painters.

"Human form, yes. Wolf form out there eating people, no."

"What about vampires?"

"Now that's a conundrum," Nathan admitted.

"If you can contract vampirism but not murder people, no, you don't deserve to die. All bets are off for vampires doing vampire shit."

"Can Earth-born vampires choose not to murder? Any of the vampires in gates are basically feral." Nathan thought.

"Good question." He fished out his phone and started to type.

"Searching it?" He shook his head.

"Better."

"rainnnyyyyyyyy. can earthborn vampires choose not to murder?"

"Is that a random question, or are you and I following the same story?"

"i'd say thoughtfully random. what story are you talking about?"

"There's a YouTuber in Lisbon who claims to have lived as a vampire for the last 5 years without killing anyone. His girlfriend is a vampire too. They are trying to advocate for the fair treatment of vampires since they can live among humans peacefully. Allegedly. His girlfriend also makes spicy content, so it's not clear if this is for real or an attempt to market to a specific fetish." She sent a link to his channel.

"soooooo they can choose not to murder?"

"I don't have an answer, but there are people suggesting it's possible." Based on the comments I saw on the channel, a great many people believed it was impossible for a vampire to be a normal citizen.

"Is the Freddy hunt getting to you?" Nathan asked.

"No, it's not that. I've just been trying to think of content ideas for the channel."

"I think people would watch vampire and werewolf hunts. Nah, not just think. I know they would. But if they can be normal people who happen to be part monster? Let them live their lives, you know?"

"Yeah, and I agree completely."

"When they finally make us the kings of mankind, everything will be so much easier," Nathan said with a sigh.