Chương 41: Mandatory Trainings

Day after day of video modules on workplace safety, followed by endless quizzes and tests, made my daily challenges dull affairs. I got called in to do an E-ranked Roach Run and a D-ranked goblin run in that first week, netting myself 452 XP in total, but otherwise the most interesting thing to happen was that Nathan and I were alone in the apartment for an entire evening. No Megan. No Beth and Jonathan. Just the two of us, a few bowls of cereal, and a playlist of crawl videos on the television. Like old times.

"Life suddenly got fast, huh?" Nathan mused.

"What do you mean?"

"This used to be us every night, but it feels like it's been months since this has happened. We're actually doing shit out in the world." Laughing, I said, "It's definitely been busy."

"You and I are good, right? Just because we're not chilling together every night, we're not any less of friends."

"Not on my end."

"Good. Good."

"What happens if things keep progressing with you and Megan?" I asked.

"Seems like that's going well."

"You mean like living arrangements?"

"Yeah." Nathan shrugged.

"Bro, it's weird. I know there's a sequence to this, like we eventually move in together, get married, merge bank accounts. All that jazz. I don't know that I want all that."

"You don't want to move in with Megan?"

"No, that's not what I mean. Things are going well, and I wouldn't want to throw that away, but the normal way is so damn linear. You know those old sitcoms where all the friends live in the same apartment or floor or whatever?"

"Yeah."

"Why isn't that an option? Like, Megan feels like an addition to my life and not a replacement for friendship, and I think we all like hanging out together, so what the fuck?" Laughing, I said, "No, I don't know 'what the fuck.'""Man, life is short. If Megan goes to sleep early one night, I want to be able to walk down the hall and play video games with my best friend. You know? Why isn't that a life plan option?"

"How would that work?" Nathan shrugged.

"I don't know. Maybe we get apartments on the same floor. Maybe we go in on an actual house, something we'd never be able to afford by ourselves, and divvy up private and shared space. For how you and Megan are doing with crawling, we could build a damn castle outside of the city. That's me volunteering you guys for monster security, but you know, I'll wash dishes or something to do my part."

"Wow."

"You think I'm crazy."

"I don't," I said.

"It's not something I expected. Like you said, the path is usually pretty linear, so you or I moving on felt inevitable. We'd still be friends, but you'd be doing your own thing."

"Well, Megan and I aren't rushing things, so we've got time, bro. Something to think about." Nathan was right. The life path didn't need to be totally linear, and I liked those kinds of sitcoms too. For as elaborate or as goofy as some of the plots to those shows ended up being, the multiple characters hanging out and sharing space always seemed so natural. People who liked spending time together organized their lives around that very thing. And it was fun.

On the Beth side of my life, I liked the idea of her staying close too. We were just beginning to be real friends again, but why did her interest in Jonathan, or whoever it might be, have to mean the two of us separating again?

"This isn't a new idea," I said after a while.

"Hmm?"

"Guild houses are the same concept, right? A bunch of crawlers share a big-ass house. Plenty of their own space, and then there's a game room or a swimming pool in the middle." Nathan thought.

"You mean like a party sharing a place?"

"Yeah. If I'm not in your fucking party by now, we have bigger problems." Laughing, Nathan replied, "Nah, man. We're definitely in the same party. I like framing it like that, though, because it's true. You got me through a bunch of shit, had my back, and looked out for me."

"You mean that's what you did for me." He started counting on his fingers.

"I totaled my car in that ice storm, and you walked a bunch of winter clothes out to me. Middle of the night. Didn't hesitate. I don't want to try to add up all the drunk nights you got me home because that's a bunch right there. Then you had my back when Susie broke my heart. Shit, when my mom passed, you came home with me and spent a week cleaning out her house. You boxed up like a thousand Precious Moments figurines and never complained." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform.

Support original creators! I didn't know what to say.

"Like a party," Nathan repeated.

"We hold each other up. Spreads the challenges out."

"Are we really talking about getting ourselves a guild house?" Nathan shrugged.

"I'm down."

"Alright. Me too."

Megan and I spent Saturday clearing a goblin nest out of old townhomes. The goblins broke through the drywall to make six individual homes into one big fortress. After staring down a pair of trolls, a nest of nineteen goblins felt downright pedestrian. We still needed to be on our game, so it wasn't like we didn't take it seriously. However, the jolt of fear I used to get when I saw a goblin set its sights on me wasn't there. Instead of fear, I felt focused. Alert.

I wished that focus persisted during the safety training I had to endure for the next week, but alas, I suffered. McDouglas checked in with me briefly to see if I had heard from Brennan Kielar yet. I hadn't. He said that was normal, but the idea that Brennan would suddenly have a bout of conscience and call me to confess seemed far-fetched. Then again, I was the intern. I didn't really know anything.

I wish I could say evenings were more exciting, but I only got called in for one dungeon gate that whole time, a D-ranked termite gate. I checked my progress to level 6 right after: XP Progress: 701/1600 Now that I qualified for D-ranked gates, leveling was less painful. As long as I was playing cleanup for the CDM, my forward movement could only go so fast, but getting a few hundred XP from a D-ranked cull versus maybe 40 from an E-ranked was a world of a difference.

I might feel different about that a few levels from now, but I was satisfied at the moment.

Sunday morning, my phone rang while I was still asleep. I snatched it, excited to have a gate to run. When I saw it was Grensmith's number and not the general CDM office line, I knew it wasn't good news.

"Good morning, Gray. Sorry to bother you so early, but I need you in Monroeville at a C-ranked. Get your kit and go to the address I'm texting you now. Be ready to wave your ID around to get through the traffic." I could appreciate the need for brevity in emergency situations, but the way the CDM handled it felt unnecessarily dramatic. Give me at least a hint of what I'm walking into so I can get my head on straight. Was that so much to ask?

Grensmith was right about traffic being bad, especially for a Sunday, but he was wrong about my ID having any power to get me around it. The civilians in front and behind me couldn't move out of my way if they wanted to–and they didn't, to be clear–because there was nowhere for them to go. This gate had appeared in the middle of the interstate, which was problem enough. Whatever had gone wrong only made the problem worse. A police officer on a motorcycle drove the wrong way through the standstill traffic.

When I saw her coming, I dangled my ID out the window. She paused next to my car. Into her radio, she said, "I've got a CDM to escort. Flagging their vehicle for recovery." To me, she said, "Get your gear. I'll take you to the gate. We've got someone coming to get your car." Well, this was new. I felt pretty damn important right then. I threw my kit over my shoulder and climbed onto the back of the motorcycle and held on. That was my first time on a motorcycle of any kind.

We wove through traffic, sideview mirrors nipping the loose fabric of my pant legs as we wiggled this way and that to squeeze through, traveling at a speed that felt several steps above reckless. I didn't like it. As the gate came into view, my glimpses of CDM enforcers and investigators made my stomach sink. Everyone was suiting up in plastics a dozen yards away from the gate with biohazard boxes and bags stacked around them. I knew what that meant. This was a crawler recovery assignment.

"You can get off now," the motorcycle cop said. I didn't realize we had stopped. How long had we been sitting still with me clinging to her back?

"Sorry," I said.

"Thanks for the ride." She didn't reply. She shifted gears and drove back into traffic.

"We were about to go in," Grensmith said.

"You got five. Suit up. We'll wait so you can just go in with the group." I didn't recognize him at first, as I only had the bridge of his nose and his eyes to go on. The rest of him was covered in biohazard protocol protective gear. He stayed with me as I dressed, which was an additional level of pressure I didn't enjoy, and updated me on the situation. I half expected him to assign me a module on how to properly dress for work, due the next morning, naturally.

"This is an Iron Crawlers' gate. Harvest team showed up this morning to start work and walked into a mess, which is unusual. ICs don't generally give us any trouble." Technically, the Iron Crawlers were the third-largest crawl team in Pittsburgh, but they were tiny compared to the first two in those rankings, the Furious Few and the Mill Rats. Now that Grensmith mentioned it, I couldn't recall ever citing an Iron Crawler for anything in my brief career with the CDM.

Grensmith continued, "The rest of us have been briefed. I want you to assess the scene as we go and come to your own conclusion. This will be a good test of your training." A Sunday morning test? I wasn't even awake yet.

"I'll do my best," I said. As soon as I pulled the plastic hood over my head and cinched it tight, I followed Grensmith and five other CDMs to the gate entrance a little ways farther down the highway. Right away, I spotted a trail of blood. Like the juice from a leaky garbage bag, it came out of the gate–a cave mouth wrapped in thick vines in this case–went to the side of the road, and then over the guardrail. The embankment on the other side was steep and disappeared into woods.

Someone with an injury fled the scene. That was easy enough to deduce. A murderous crawler might run like that, but a crawler scheduled for this gate would have a vehicle close by. A few were pulled off the side of the road nearby with crawler passes in the windows, in fact, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense for an injured suspect to leave on foot instead of taking their own car. A gate crasher, however, would make sense. Their transportation was more likely to be hidden rather than parked right next to the gate.

Crashing a C-ranked gate took some stones. A few guilds brought in level 7s and 8s with escorts for training purposes, but most proper C gate runs had parties of level 10s and higher. I couldn't imagine many crashers having those kinds of levels. Yet, the blood trail was here. The inside of the gate would tell the rest of the grisly story.