Chương 181: CDM 3, Chapter 57: Contact

"This is a weird way to camp," Giago mused, looking at the cracked parking lot beneath his feet and the drab backsides of 100 year-old small-town storefronts.

"I, for one, am stoked we had exactly two wilderness survival courses," Nathan joked.

"I'm not sure if this is what Guy was preparing us for, though."

"You were talking about joining a drone club or something a while back," Hornby said to Nathan.

"You ever try that?" Nathan nodded.

"I've been to one meetup. I learned how much I don't know, but otherwise, no secret technique to being a pro drone pilot. Not yet, at least."

"Like what?"

"Well, there are simulators that run on a PC like any other video game. It's not the real thing, but it's close enough, so I've done a bit of practice with one of those. I didn't expect everyone to prefer first-person piloting, though. That's kind of messed with my plans."

"You mean with VR goggles?" de Saint asked.

"Yep. I'll give them that it feels a bit more natural to have the camera tracking with your head, but that won't work for us. Everyone at the club is a solo pilot who wants to go fast and pull off cool maneuvers. None of them are trying to communicate with a squad, so they don't ever need to look over at a map or another screen. I didn't realize how often I was looking at something other than the drone camera to do my job, you know?"

"That makes sense. I think I would have the same concerns. Sorry that I haven't been able to go with you yet. I am serious about learning to pilot like that." Nathan waved her worry away.

"Dude, don't sweat it. The world is burning down faster each day. I also planned to be doing a bunch of airsoft to get some tactical experience, but keeping up with our work is two full-time jobs in one."

"Does feel like we get a new crisis each day," Megan grumbled.

"It's exhausting."

"I wish they weren't so out of reach," I said.

"That would make it easier." The other five faces around the fire turned my direction. I started counting on my fingers.

"Rising active mana levels? I can't do shit about that. Drakes and salamanders encroaching on Canada and attacking planes? Nothing I can do there either. Updating our tech and algorithms for Stage 2 gates? Nope. Super-crawlers living in the wilds? Doomers forcing surges? Doomers poisoning whole cities with blight slime? Jesus, I'm probably missing one or two things on that list."

"Hornby's beef jerky farts," Giago suggested. The white spellsword smacked Giago's shoulder.

"Is that how it is, huh? Brother, when you fall asleep, you fucking spread. One big lump of limp Latino."

"What are you talking about?" When Giago looked for allies, he found none.

"You all agree with him?" Megan shrugged.

"You do kind of just get wide. When you're awake, you take up one seat. When you fall asleep, you could fill two or three."

"That's not true."

"Sorry, Giago," de Saint added.

"Why didn't any of you ever stop me?" he asked. Hornby laughed.

"You weigh like 1, 000 pounds. I can barely lift your arm when you're out."

"There is no stopping a Giago spread," Nathan said, smiling. When the laughter around the fire died down, I turned to Megan.

"Did Chapman give you any other updates when you called to check in?" Her face fell.

"She suggested I try to keep your spirits up. Not having internet access out here could be its own kind of blessing."

"What aren't you telling us?" Sighing, she said, "New York City is in bad shape. Tap water is contaminated by blight slime. A few hundred people or so have died from drinking it already. FEMA and the National Guard are trying to get people out and bring fresh water in, but there are so many people. Looting is already fairly widespread, but they expect it to get worse. The death toll is going to spike tomorrow and the day after, most likely. People either die of dehydration or die from drinking tainted water."

The levity that once filled our camp disappeared.

"What else?" Nathan asked. When Megan hesitated, de Saint added, "I would always rather know. I don't want blissful ignorance." Everyone nodded that they agreed.

"I can respect that," Megan replied.

"The New York City news was the worst of it. New Eden is getting hammered with wild monster attacks. Wyoming, Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, and Kansas had Stage 2 surges. It's not clear which were accidents and which were doomer-made." Hornby held up his hands.

"You're sayin' all of that happened today while we were on the road?"

"Yes."

"Christ. That's nuts."

"The 'super crawlers' say they represent the Kingdom of Assam. I didn't get many details from Chapman on that piece of news, but it seems they want the rest of the world to fuck off and leave them alone. They've rebuffed every attempt to contact them and won't share any of their knowledge."

"We're lucky anyone is still alive who speaks Assamese to translate," de Saint said.

"India had over 100 languages and several thousand dialects before the gates came. We've already lost most of those." Giago shook his head in disbelief.

"I give it another week before a politician does something dumb and pisses them off. What the fuck kind of unlocks does a post-level 40 black mage get? The stat points alone are insane, but the spells? We have no idea what we're in for if that goes south." I leaned back in my foldout chair and wished for a moment I had packed beer.

"The secret is too good. No government has ever been okay with hearing 'no' when they want something."

"We can figure it out, though," de Saint suggested.

"It might take us some time, but it's possible to do this without them."

"What makes you so sure?" Giago asked.

"They don't know how multiclassing works, so they aren't some ultimate system experts. Like us, they probably figured out leveling by accident rather than through any intentional plan or strategy. Give a team of anthropologists a few months, and I bet they could uncover what this one group of people did differently–probably by mistake–to make that possible."

"We ain't got months," Hornby said.

"Weren't you listening to the end of the world list just now?"

"I think we would if everyone could chill the fuck out for once." Nathan guffawed.

"Right. Humans playing it cool. That's a good one." Paw Paw Creek Road ran parallel to a stream and a set of railroad tracks. This road was slightly more passable than what we saw yesterday, but not by much. The forest on either side had been left to grow unchecked, creating the illusion of a tunnel as we drove. The roof of the truck scraped low branches at times, and we had to stop twice to drag deadfall out of our way. We parked a few hundred feet away from the town limits.

Nathan and de Saint launched their drones. The rest of us slapped Diva sponsor magnets on the ice cream truck and then settled in to watch the drone feeds. From overhead, Grant Town reminded me of Daisy Town, the location of my first-ever wild monster hunt. Most of the structures were destroyed in the early days of the gates, but I could still see what used to be big grassy yards between humble homes. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it At the time, I knew nothing of the town's history. When I had internet access later, I learned that the town had been named for the president of the Federal Coal and Coke Company. At its height, the Grant Town Mine was considered the largest underground coal mine in the world. When monsters decimated the town, the coal mine persisted, staying open until the 1980s.

Instead of rebuilding Grant Town, workers relocated to Fairview and used handcarts to commute to work via the railroad tracks. The best description I found for what the town was like came from an anthology of West Virginia ghost stories called The Telltale Lilac Bush:"Surrounded by hills, [Grant Town] is a kind of a sunken garden–a well at the bottom of the stairway of hills and highways–so that it seems to be in a world of its own. In a way, perhaps, it is.

At least fourteen different European nationalities live in the town and work in the mine." Even when I had access to old photos of Grant Town, I couldn't reconcile those images and historical descriptions with the rubble I saw in person. For most of the places I had visited on hunts, I could imagine what they used to be like when times were good, and dungeon gates didn't exist. All of those places had something left, though: bones I could use as a foundation for the mental picture I painted.

Grant Town, however, was too far gone.

"Won't be much for us to search," Nathan said.

"We've seen five houses still kind of standing, and I don't think even bugbears would stay in those." While Nathan went north, de Saint flew her drone south. She saw one or two houses, but none of them were good candidates for the size of the bugbear tribe we were tracking.

"This could be something," she said a few minutes later.

"That one is big enough, right? Looks like 50 ft by 75 ft." We all looked at de Saint's screen. Her drone hovered over an old red brick building that had likely stood since the 1900s. It was on the other side of the creek from the rest of the town. The main bridge to access it had long since collapsed, but the bridge for the railroad tracks that passed alongside it still stood.

"There!" Megan exclaimed, pointing at the screen.

"That was a bugbear. It ducked back into the trees just now. Pull the drones back." Nathan and de Saint did as they were told.

"If this tribe is wise to drones like the other one, lingering will tip them off that we're coming," Megan explained.

"Sweep with thermal on the way back to see if anything might be hiding in the town between them and us. The rest of us will get geared up in the meantime." 30 minutes later, our squad walked through town to approach the bugbear camp while the drones hung back to avoid alerting our quarry. The one bugbear Megan had seen may have spotted our drone earlier, but we hoped the appearance of the drone leaving for good would put them at ease. We bedded down on the town side of the creek.

Megan had initially wanted to cross upstream so we could approach from the forested side of the building, but the growth was too thick. Hacking through it would make too much noise, so we used what was left of Grant Town roads to get as close as we dared. The bugbears were cautious for the next hour and didn't reveal themselves, though Hornby was certain he saw movement in the windows of the buildings.

Eventually, however, they relaxed, and we watched them travel between the structure and the densest part of the old-growth treeline. They scanned the sky every trip. They were definitely wise to the threat drones posed. Before, we could argue that maybe they got lucky or that we were overanalyzing what we witnessed. No more. We had to admit they were learning how humans hunted. We observed for two hours or so, but we couldn't see very much of what they were actually doing.

All we could say is that some of them sheltered in the building, and some were busy in the forest. Hornby and I had counted 11 tent impressions. We didn't know a whole lot about the habits of bugbear tribes, so we couldn't guess if they ever shared tents. At a minimum, 11 bugbears were in this tribe. If they doubled up at all, there could be 15 to 18 of them in total.

"Rainy," Megan whispered into her radio.

"Is there a way for Dorion and me to get across the creek unnoticed to flank them?"

"Hold, please," de Saint replied.

"Yes. There's an intact bridge down the road. You'll have to go about a mile out of your way to avoid being spotted."

"Osheski," Giago whispered.

"Not disrespecting you, but you should send Hornby and me. We did shit like this in the service all the time." Megan thought for a moment about who had the most experience circumnavigating a target in unfamiliar terrain and nodded.

"Rainy, guide Hornby and Giago to the bridge."

"Roger that." Hornby and Giago slipped away and needed about an hour to double back into town and then loop around to the north. In that time, Megan instructed Nathan and de Saint to be ready to follow bugbears that might attempt to run south when we attacked. When everyone was in position, Megan and I walked down the railroad tracks looking intentionally oblivious to the bugbears lying in wait.

Like we had seen the EPA exterminators do, we planned to attack from one side, draw their attention, and then hit them from behind. We didn't have the benefit of detailed intel on our quarry. We were better off drawing as many of them out of hiding as possible to get a true sense of their numbers. We hoped visibly stupid humans would make bugbears lower their guards. The railroad bridge was made from black iron, and much of the wood had rotted away, but the frame was intact.

As long as we watched our step, we would be fine. In that moment, I noticed how serene the world seemed to be. My footsteps on old wood were dull and a little hollow. A shallow stream babbled as water washed over rocks. The sun was bright, and spring had turned every plant and tree into a lush, vibrant green.

"I've got movement to my 2 o'clock," I said under my breath, doing my best not to look in that direction.

"Three of them, I think."

"Got at least two at 11 o'clock, near the building," Megan replied. She put her shield hand on my back, and a surge of power coursed through me. In an instant, I felt stronger, faster, and more alert. The effects of a Bless spell made me feel superhuman, like I was the greatest warrior on the planet. I loved it. Megan whispered, "Break left and pull the others with us in 3, 2…" She took off at a sprint toward the bugbears she had spotted. Two appeared from behind trees with their bows drawn.

Megan blocked one arrow with her shield. I hit the other archer twice, ruining his shot but not downing him. Even with two arrows sticking out of his left arm, he raised his bow to draw again, but Megan was already on him. She slipped his attempt to smack her with the bow and triggered Rapid Strike, punching three holes in the monster's chest in an instant. I pinned the other bugbear behind a tree with a nonstop volley of arrows. He reached for a spear when Megan got to him.

She blocked a heavy kick with her shield and came up with her sword as the leg went back down, severing it at the ankle. And we kept moving, the bugbears I had seen a few moments earlier now in pursuit. Arrows flew out of the dark windows of the brick building as we approached, their swift flights sounding like scissors cutting paper as they whizzed by us. We slid into cover behind a rusted-out pickup truck.

"Go, go, go," Megan radioed. For my part, I witnessed relatively little of the action that followed. Nathan swooped in with his drone and directed me where to fire, so for most of the fight, I didn't leave cover. The drone footage of the battle, however, was pretty damn cool. While Megan and I hunkered down to endure the rain of arrows sent our way, columns of colored smoke erupted from the forest on the opposite side of the battlefield, four in total. Two were yellow, and two were pink.

Giago and Hornby recycled a tactic Megan and I used to clear the Chestnut Ridge goblin nest. That much activity, even though it was from harmless smoke signals, sowed chaos and gave the illusion that there were far more of us than there really were. The bugbears were already caught flat-footed by our attack from behind, and finding a black spellblade and an archer lobbing attacks from cover was hard for the bugbears to do in all the confusion.

De Saint took over calling shots for me, which was a bit like scratching someone's back and them saying, "Up a little, right, no, too far, okay down. Ahhhh, that's it," except with blind shots of a bow. Nathan swooped into the top floor of the building. I couldn't see them doing it, but Nathan pointed at de Saint's screen, a mostly overhead perspective, to indicate where inside the bugbears were. While she pointed my bow, he kept scouting.

"Two inbound on you, Osheski," de Saint called. A few seconds later, the old truck we hid behind shook and creaked as the goblinoids bounded over our cover, coming down on us with spears. Megan triggered Outnumbered, throwing them off course in mid-air. They awkwardly thudded into the ground on either side of us. I pumped arrows into one while Megan pounced on the other. Being so much taller than she was, her bugbear shot a hand forward to crush her throat.

It very nearly succeeded, but Megan chopped at the arm before it could finish the job. Her sword didn't cut all the way through, but she severed tendon and muscle before following up with a thrust to the bugbear's face. Mine attempted to stand, but he was surviving on adrenaline alone as blood leaked from a dozen arrow wounds. As soon as he picked his head up, I put three into the side of his skull.

"They're focusing Hornby and Giago," de Saint announced. I gave Megan cover fire as she ran to the brick building.

"Osheski, coming at the doorway to your right in 3," Nathan radioed. As the bugbear charged toward me, Megan went low and took out his legs. I kept him down with arrows. On the other side of the building, Giago had drawn his sword. He parried two spear thrusts while Hornby lined up a Power Shot that blew through a bugbear skull. The sudden explosion of its friend's brain made the second hesitate long enough for Giago to get inside with his sword, partially severing its neck.

Four more bugbear warriors were left after that. They hid in the building to make their last stand, but they weren't a match for voidwood and were too wounded to fend off Megan and Giago when they finally breached.

"There are two bugbear women and three children on the second floor," Nathan radioed, attempting but failing to hide the reluctant discomfort in his voice.

"The women are injured already, it looks like."

"I'll take care of this so you guys don't have to see it," Giago volunteered.

"I'm going with you," Megan replied. The black spellblade didn't argue, only nodded, and the pair went upstairs to slay the bugbear children and officially end the battle.