Chương 36: Professional-Grade

Looking for a new bow was like shopping for a new car. I knew ahead of time that my budget was limited, but I couldn't help looking at the high-end models I'd never be able to afford. A top-of-the-line bow was made from legendary ironwood at a minimum, which came from ancient trees only found in S-ranked gates.

Legendary wood, ironwood or otherwise, was the only material durable enough to withstand the extreme demands a high-level archer put on their equipment, and it was also capable of holding the strongest enchantments. One legendary ironwood bow I saw was enchanted with Greater Fire. Every arrow that left the bow triggered an explosion equivalent to the Greater Fire spell, which is somewhere around a mortar in terms of its power.

At that level, it was also assumed an archer would have taken the Conjure Arrow ability, making a quiver unnecessary. The very act of drawing a bow summoned an arrow for the archer to fire. Combining that ability with the Greater Fire enchantment and a dex build turned an archer into a mortar launcher with machine gun speed and supernatural accuracy. Greater Bolt looked similarly impressive, but I was also drawn to the less flashy enchantments. A Greater Strength enchantment increased the damage arrows dealt.

A power build might use that. Greater Agility buffed firing speed. Confusion, Blindness, and Poison also sounded useful. But no way would I ever be able to afford a weapon made of S-ranked material. Juvenile ironwoods could appear in D gates but were more consistently found in C gates. Those trees were considered lesser ironwood when they were processed, and that was the minimum strength I needed for my dex build.

Enchantments were possible at that grade of wood, but the material could hold very little mana, and even an incredibly minor enchantment was costly. As a result, most people wouldn't invest in an enchantment for anything below greater ironwood. Other types of wood grew in dungeon gates, but they were rarer than ironwood and had special properties in addition to their natural durability.

Silverwood, bloodwood, livingwood, voidwood, and starwood–they all made fine bows that cost more than I would make in several lifetimes. A new lesser ironwood bow would set me back the equivalent of five rent payments. I didn't have that kind of money, and my credit card debt had already grown farther than I ever should have let it. If I was lucky, I might be able to find a used bow for three months' rent. Really, really lucky? Two or less.

You always heard stories of people buying a sword at a garage sale for pocket change only to discover later it was of legendary quality and enchanted to make your dick three times bigger or something else outrageous. I never had that kind of luck in my life. If anything, I would end up overpaying for a piece of garbage. But a decent deal wasn't out of the question.

I started to aimlessly browse three or four different auction sites and peer-to-peer marketplaces whenever I had downtime, hoping I stumbled into something affordable. That's what I was doing while McDouglas went into a gas station to get himself an energy drink. This was our third time being paired up that week. He sat in the driver's seat but hesitated before he started the car.

"The crasher case has gone cold, by the way," he added after a time.

"No one else from that church tried to crash gates, so the surveillance team is off the detail. With no new evidence, warrants for crawler footage are still out of the question, so we're basically waiting for something new to happen."

"I see."

"So you didn't miss anything exciting."

"I torched my relationship with Enforcer Chapman, though." With a wince, McDouglas said, "Yeah, you did do that. Sounds like you've picked up that she holds a grudge, but her philosophy isn't the only philosophy at the agency. Plenty of other people wouldn't hold a few crawls against you. Shows initiative."

"That's good to know. I thought she was going to fire me right there at first."

"I can see why you'd think that," he replied with a chuckle.

"Sean was saying you picked up a shift with him this weekend."

"Yeah, now that I'm medically cleared." And Megan and I had decided to take this weekend off from hunting. She was hoping to get a cull or two in to push her to level 6, and I needed to make a few extra bucks. Hunting trips were out of pocket, and I needed to pretend like I could someday save up the money for an ironwood bow.

"What do you think of Sean?" McDouglas asked.

"Easy to work with. Knows his stuff."

"What do you think of the work?"

"It's not bad," I answered.

"Exploring can be fun, and I like getting away from my computer screen. Why do you ask?"

"Trying to guess how long it will be until the DOH tries to poach you."

"Sean would do that?" McDouglas laughed.

"No, Sean wouldn't. His bosses would, though. They see a name on reports often enough, they get curious."

"Are you worried I would jump ship?"

"Would you?"

"I know this is the wrong thing to say, and I get disappointed looks whenever I talk this way, but if the money was good enough, yeah."

"That's the real answer for everyone, whether they admit it or not," he said.

"We've all got problems that money could solve, right?"

"Right."

"And then he headbutted you?" Sean asked as we descended a set of crooked porch stairs.

"Yep." Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Damn. Every time I wonder if the DOH was the right choice, I hear a wild story like yours that confirms I made the right call." We were back in the town where we stumbled upon that meth lab weeks back. Police had only recently conducted the raid. While they couldn't guarantee there weren't more meth labs in the city, they were certain that particular house was no longer a problem. So far, no new meth labs.

"A sheath for your crowbar is pretty serious," Sean said.

"You really don't need the bow, and what are those you got strapped in like a bandoleer? You look like you're in an action movie."

"Those are flares."

"Flares? For what?"

"Trolls." Sean's eyes said he had several more questions, but he swallowed them. After hunting with Megan, moving through ruins without a weapon felt foolish, and the crowbar sheath was exceedingly practical. Once you tried having a crowbar sheath on your back, you never went back to not having a crowbar sheath. Just couldn't.

"I've been training as much as I can, so it's weird to not have this setup, even if I don't need it." Sean pondered a moment.

"I guess that makes sense."

"Sorry if it's weird."

"No, no, it's fine." It was definitely weird, but I preferred feeling strange to having a goblin nest get the jump on me.

"Having you back is great, but I should warn you that shifts might dry up for a bit. This could be the last one for a while."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Demolition schedules are way behind. An inspection is only good for so long. After a certain amount of time, we have to redo it."

"Makes sense."

"Alright, back to the car. There's a high school up the hill, and then we're done." Fifteen minutes later, I forced open a gymnasium door. The floorboards were warped, rotten, and broken from soaking in rainwater and drying under sunlight over and over. The glass of the basketball backboards was shattered long ago, and it looked like someone took an axe to the bleachers purely for the fun of it.

"Does this take you back?" Sean asked as we crossed the court.

"My high school experience wasn't quite like this."

"This is a pretty small school," he said.

"Only a hundred graduates a year or so in its prime. Most schools are bigger." I laughed.

"I graduated with ten other people."

"Seriously?"

"Private church school." Sean shook his head.

"That sounds awful. My high school was big enough that you could get away from the jerks at least some of the time. Can't imagine you could do that with a class that size."

"Nope. It was the same kids from preschool all the way through twelfth grade. Was definitely claustrophobic at times."

"Well, moving on from that topic, we need to keep an eye out for propane and pressurized canisters. Don't assume you won't find one just because it was a history classroom or something else innocuous."

"You find a lot of those in schools?"

"Sure do. Usually it's the shop classrooms that have a few old jugs of something kicking around, and it's better if we find them before the demolition crew drops a building on them and boom. I say check everywhere because they have a way of migrating around a building after so long. Art rooms and science rooms are the other big doozies. All sorts of chemical cleaners and spray paint sitting around in an art class, and the science rooms are that but worse because they have gas lines."

We entered a first-floor hallway lined on each side with lockers. Most of them were open. A few sections had been ripped from the wall and tipped over. Moving from classroom to classroom, we cleared that level little by little. The library was especially sad. Shelves full of books were left to rot where they stood. Old computer monitors lined the far wall. The return cart was pulled off to the side and had a stack of titles on it as though a librarian would appear at any moment to finish reshelving them.

"Hard to believe there was no one who wanted any of this," Sean mused, poking at an old encyclopedia.

"I'm always amazed by how many books we see on this job." I didn't know what to say to that.

"I basically lived in the library," Sean continued.

"The librarian at my school was like a shepherd for the weird kids. Gave us a place to hide out and be ourselves."

"Sounds like a nice person."

"Yeah, she was." We searched the second floor next, and it was more of the same. The most interesting sights were an art classroom with sketches on the wall and a science lab covered in frog and baby pig skeletons. Sean twisted the handle on the gas tap of a chemistry workbench.

"Smell that?"

"Gas."

"Every once in a while, these lines are still active, got left on and no one realized. That smell could just be gas left in the lines, but that's pretty dangerous too. We mark that down as a potential hazard so it gets looked at before work begins."

"Hitting an active gas line is probably a bad day."

"Ha! Definitely memorable." He twisted the gas tap back closed.

"Old schools are my least favorite," Sean said as we went back downstairs.

"Creepy?"

"No, hollow, maybe? There used to be so many children here, all with dreams and aspirations. I remember reading about ruins in Greece and Rome as a kid and could never understand how such massive structures were just abandoned."

"And then you get this job," I said.

"And then I get this job," Sean chuckled.

"I thought becoming an engineer meant building stuff. Instead, I'm wiping away decades of history. All the people who devoted their lives to building these places, to raising families here, and we're erasing it."

"You doing okay?" I asked.

"It's this damn school. Ignore me."

"If you could do anything for your career, what would it be?"

"Huh?"

"You said this wasn't what you expected," I said.

"If you had your way, what would it be like?"

"City design, or urban planning, but I hate calling it that."

"Build cities?"

"Technically, yes, but the idea is that we can make everyone's lives better with how we design the spaces we occupy. There's all this research about how a city itself can foster health and happiness, but nobody does anything with it. We're still building cities the same way, which is just making it up as we go, and that's a waste. We redesigned society around dungeon gates, and we got stuck in the same loop as every civilization in history because of it." I looked at Sean quizzically.

"Survival was all that mattered, so we built for tomorrow instead of the next decade and made all the same mistakes."

"Cities are that bad?" Sean cracked his neck and held the gymnasium door open for me.

"Something simple like having shade trees on a street makes an enormous difference for the people who live there. The heat difference in the summers is enormous, so even just existing is easier. The poorest parts of the city? No shade. All concrete."

"I never thought about that."

"You'll notice the next time you go for a walk in the middle of a hot summer, and that's only one change. Public transportation, access to grocery stores, communal spaces… I'm not talking about building a utopia. These are basic fundamentals."

"Maybe someday," I offered. Sean looked out over the town ruins.

"Maybe someday."