Chương 51: Changing Market Conditions

"I'll record you, and then you record me," Megan said.

"Don't think too much about it. Say what it is, where it's from, and what you like about it." We had pulled off onto a dirt road a little more than two miles away from the Site of Concern. We would have preferred to be much closer, but this was the most rural SOC Megan and I had tried yet, and we learned quickly that my beater car was unfit for difficult terrain. Urban and suburban SOCs had already presented us several travel challenges in our short careers as wild monster hunters.

This latest experience cemented the fact that we needed better ways to travel. I recalled riding ATVs to particular remote gates, and that sounded like a good solution, except that it would cost a crazy amount of money. The ATV itself was expensive, but then we would need a trailer, a vehicle that could pull a trailer, fuel for the ATV, and then whatever it costs to register and maintain the ATV and trailer. I rubbed my head as I thought.

"So hold up the bow and say, 'Hey, this is a nice bow. If you like nice bows, go see Frank.'""Steel Town Bow & Arrow."

"Huh?"

"Use his business name instead of his personal name."

"Right," I replied.

"Helmet on? Should I use a girly voice to sell the persona?"

"As much as I want to see you pretend to be a woman for the rest of the run, just be you. The voice changer will do the rest." I nodded.

"Hello… everybody. You may have noticed I broke my bow fighting trolls, and then Fra- Steel Town Bows & Arrows reached out. Uhh… So this is a lesser ironwood recurve bow. As you can see, it's pretty nice."

"Do you like it?" Megan asked.

"Yes." She sighed.

"Tell us why you like it."

"Sure. First of all, it's a bow that can keep up. My dex build is hell on a bow, and I've pushed this one hard. Always feels strong and reliable. And… Uhh… The craftsmanship. This bow looks good on camera, but it feels even better to hold. I've never felt so comfortable with a weapon before."

"... So if the viewers like it?"

"If you're looking for a new bow, check out Steel Town Bows & Arrows, and tell them the Dungeon Divas sent you." Megan chuckled.

"We'll get better with practice. Okay, are you ready to film me?"

"I just look at you while you talk, correct?"

"Yes."

"I can handle that." Megan cleared her throat and straightened her back. She looked up at me–and the GoPro attached to my helmet–and wiggled as if shaking out her nerves.

"I love my brawler class," she began, "but we're in our gear for hours, and since I'm using a Machine Gun build, all this armor and equipment wears on my skin. Then I get sweaty, and it gets worse and worse." She held up a compression shirt and pants.

"I'm wearing these under my armor now, and I already feel so much better. You've probably seen athletes wear something like this, and it's a similar idea for crawlers. The fabric gives you an extra layer of protection over your skin while helping you control your body temperature and wicking away sweat. The problem, though, is that armor introduces all sorts of new demands. Check this out." Megan pointed to the various points of reinforcement around the shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees.

"Ironskin rashguards and compression pants are designed for martial classes, and this sounds crazy to say, but they don't bunch up because they connect to your armor here, here, and here. I know, I know. Everything bunches no matter what, but these are different. I promise.

"These simple additions are genius improvements. When you're fighting, you don't get that weird issue of your armor twisting one direction while the underlayer twists the other. Don't you hate that? If you do, give Ironskin products a try." Exhaling, she tossed the gear back into the car.

"Was that okay? I can't believe how quickly Beth pulled this off. I don't want to let her down."

"Way better than mine."

"Being a young woman in America practically demands selfie-video training," Megan joked, "so I have an advantage over you."

"It shows. And trust me, Beth is happy to have helped. I think she likes this kind of work more than she's admitted. At any rate, shall we?" Megan nodded. She powered on our new camera drone, took a few moments to calibrate the lens and the navigation system, and then set it to follow mode. Since Megan was wearing the tracking bracelet, the drone drifted behind her and hovered a few inches over and above her shoulder.

When I approached from behind, as if we were keeping a tight formation to sweep a building, the drone automatically elevated its position to stay out of my way. It was a pretty slick piece of tech. Even before the drone arrived in the mail, Megan and I decided that of the two of us, the drone would get better footage following her than following me. As an archer, my perspective was usually zoomed out by default, taking in most of the battlefield.

Megan's, meanwhile, was up close and a mess of choppy blurs when she started swinging. If the drone worked as advertised, we would have far better footage of her Machine Gun build in action. With everything situated, we set out on the hunt. This SOC was southeast of Pittsburgh and directly west of Uniontown. Like Johnstown, Uniontown was one of the few rust belt towns large enough to attract a permanent population when industry collapsed, absorbing the dozens of smaller communities that once dotted the area.

We walked along the Youghiogheny River Gorge, using footpaths worn by kayakers and whitewater rafters who came out here for the thrill of careening downriver. Megan read that this area was once proposed to be a state park, but the dungeon gates opening killed that idea. We walked uphill along a washed-out access road, listening for movement as we scanned the horizon for monsters. Our hope was that we would find a goblin nest, but like every other SOC, we had no insight into what to actually expect.

As we hiked, it was readily apparent to me that my skill set was underdeveloped for this kind of hunt. Moving down streets and through alleys made sense to me whether the town was abandoned or not. The societal structure that used to matter was still there, and I could use it to navigate. In the deep woods like this? My phone's GPS was my lifeline, and that felt too thin for how important my life was to me.

If my battery died, or the signal was bad, or a monster hit me in the right spot to break my phone, I was hoping to find the right trail to lead me back to my car. Should nightfall arrive before that, I was screwed. That was an incredibly poor survival strategy. I needed to learn enough about wilderness navigation to, at the very least, not make big dumb newbie mistakes. I wondered if Megan was having similar thoughts, but moving sneakily was a bad time to start a conversation.

Megan raised a hand to signal a stop and crouched. She looked at me and tapped the nose of her helmet. Yeah, it smelled like goblin shit and festering meat. Nothing was in view, however. Moving more slowly now, we continued up the hill. Our destination was an old summer campground, a dozen cabins scattered around a central cafeteria with rusted playground equipment here and there in the spaces in between.

The camp hadn't been officially used since the 40s, but its location beneath dense forest canopies kept it from being wildly overgrown like other SOCs we had visited. We paused behind a downed tree and observed what we could from a distance. The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Two of the cabins had burned down at some point. None of the survivors had intact doors or windows, and at least half had sagging roofs and visibly rotted floorboards.

One had scrap wood and metal piled around it, suggesting that some time ago a squatter or two tried to make a go of living up here. From our lookout spot, we could see signs of goblin refuse, several goblin-sized footpaths worn into the earth, and a ramshackle attempt at fortifying the cafeteria. I was still rubbish at estimating goblin numbers through inferences, but this didn't strike me as a large nest. I reminded myself I didn't really know shit.

I thought the Daisytown nest was small and very nearly died to the ensuing swarm. There was no movement in the campground. We circled the perimeter, seeing more signs that goblins were here, like campfires and a few brutalized forest animal corpses, but still no actual goblins. The cafeteria building wasn't much more elaborate than a big park pavilion with walls. We approached from the rear, targeting a door that I assumed would lead to a kitchen. A musty odor hit me a few feet from the building.

This was different from goblin shit and old meat. I immediately thought of a dirty aquarium, the way the sour smell somehow feels wet as it sinks into your nostrils. The raw sewage odor was with it, but that fish tank aroma felt distinctly separate. Then again, I hadn't smelled that many goblin nests. Maybe something about the forest made a goblin garbage heap develop a unique fragrance. The door was ajar. No signs of traps yet.

Inside, that musty poop smell was far more potent, but there was no obvious source as our headlamps played over the ruins. I was right that this door led to a kitchen, or what used to be a kitchen, rather. Part of the roof had rotted through, and layers and layers of leaves had been accumulating and decaying here for so long that some of the floor felt like dirt. We were careful to watch for pit traps as we moved. Other than a detached fume hood and a few broken tables, everything else had been stripped away.

There were ghostly outlines on the walls where ovens and stovetops used to be, and the pantries were doorless, exposing their emptiness to open air. The interior wall looked like it used to open to the rest of the cafeteria, as most cafeterias of this style did, but old roller doors were down in most places, blocking our view of what was on the other side. Piled garbage and debris plugged the openings where the rollers were broken or missing.

A door to the side of those windows was open with papery white material piled on either side. Megan and I studied it closely before we passed. Dry-rotted fishing nets, perhaps? Maybe a type of reinforced tarp worn down to its strongest threads? Why the goblins had piled it here wasn't immediately clear. I thought at first they might be obscuring some nature of trap, but that didn't seem to be the case. The doorway was wholly unimpeded.

The seating area of the cafeteria was a mess of piled tables, old grass, and crumbling logs. Huge sections of the roof had caved in here, making it difficult for my eyes to properly adjust. It was as if the presence of that sunlight raining down made every shadow in the room deeper and darker, making our headlamps feel like dying flashlights We heard movement and froze just a few steps into the room. Those weren't the pitter-patters of bare footsteps.

This noise sounded like a bag of laundry dragging across a floor, a distinct but gentle scratchy hiss. What made it concerning wasn't the noise specifically, but rather the size of it. I immediately had the sense that the creature was far larger than a goblin. Megan must have reached the same conclusion because she started backing out of the dining hall. An overturned table to her left exploded into a spray of splinters. She raised her shield just in time.

A giant snake with a triangle-shaped head and green eyes snapped its jaw shut, intending to sink its chisel-length teeth into Megan's torso, but its forward momentum combined with Megan's quick reaction wedged her shield in its mouth. The two fangs curved around the metal, but the shield was stronger than the snake's bite. It couldn't finish its attack. And the snake was pissed. Wrapped with black scales and dirty brown stripes, its body was thicker than my own.

The monster was powerful, making it dangerous even without fangs and venom. Attempting to dislodge the shield, the snake whipped its head side to side. Megan managed to hang on for the first snap, but when the snake shook hard in the opposite direction, she was thrown across the room. Her small body disappeared into a pile of tables and benches coated in leaves and scrappy weeds with a violent crunch of splintering wood.

I knew she had a high constitution as a brawler, but the way she crashed through the dense debris and disappeared from sight made me scared for her. She was tough, but was she tough enough to survive that?

"I'm good!" she groaned from the shadows. Great. I wasn't, though. This bastard was fucking huge, and it was royally peeved about the shield in its mouth. I didn't have enough space for my archer build to help me. Jumping back through the door into the kitchen, I ran along the covered cafeteria windows and smacked the wood and scrap metal, searching for weak points. The snake thrashed on the other side, slamming itself about in a panic, still desperate to shake the shield loose.

"Hey! Hey!" I heard Megan call from somewhere in the dining hall. She was attempting to draw its attention. An old piece of particle board flexed when I slapped it. I palm-struck the edges and grinned when I felt the brittle material rip away from the nails holding it in place. I saw the silhouette of the snake moving deeper into the dining hall and started loosing arrows, happily taking advantage of Dual Nocking to shoot two at a time whenever the cooldown permitted.

At the same time, Tailf3ther's most recent coaching echoed in my mind: Be smooth, not fast. When he saw my dex build in action with the lesser ironwood bow, his feedback was that I seemed to rush like I wasn't confident in my speed and was desperate to be faster. He told me to focus on being controlled and efficient rather than being quick. If I did that, the speed would follow. Smooth reload. Smooth draw. Smooth loose. Smooth reload. Smooth draw. Smooth loose. Smooth reload. Smooth draw. Smooth loose.

In seconds, the snake's back grew a mohawk of arrows, but its attention was on Megan now. I couldn't see if its mouth was still barred, and a moment later, it was out of my sight. I heard the crashing sounds of Megan's sword against wood and cement with the occasional dull thunk of striking flesh. Shit. I couldn't do anything to help her from back here.

Scrambling back into the dining hall, I skidded around the piles of tables, tripped over a crunchy log–that I later learned was giant snake scat–and saw a tail disappear out the front door of the dining hall. If Megan was running, she had to be in trouble. I followed as swiftly as I could, chasing the tail into the open forest. In the open yard between cabins, near an old swingset and jungle gym, the snake stopped, pulling its body in tight and swaying as if looking for a moment to strike.

I couldn't see Megan from where I stood, but if the snake was taking the time to set up an attack, then she must still be in the fight. That also meant she wasn't running anymore, and the snake had freed its fangs to strike. Not good. Not good. Smooth reload. Smooth draw. Smooth loose. The snake snapped forward at Megan, and holy shit was it fast. She half-dodged, half-parried the monster's lunging attack. As it recoiled to prepare another bite, Megan sank her sword into its body, a few feet below the head.

The force of the snake's pained recoil ripped the weapon from her hands, leaving the sword in its body. Smooth reload. Smooth draw. Smooth loose. Megan pulled her crowbar from its sheath and circled. Her helmet was dented, and one side of her body was covered in dirt, but she looked healthy. Even better, the snake seemed to slow. Its whip-snap quickness faded as its head swayed back and forth to follow Megan. Finally, the snake turned, exposing the profile of its head to me. Smooth reload. Smooth draw.

Smooth loose. When two arrows slammed into the side of its face, the snake turned its attention to me, and that was it. Megan launched herself forward and bashed its brains in with her crowbar. The first hit, the snake glared at her with stunned anger. The next strike turned that glare to terror. After the third, it was clear the snake was departing this world. By the fourth, it was dead. But Megan gave it a fifth and a sixth smash to be certain.

The snake's head reminded me of making a gravy volcano out of mashed potatoes, smooshing down a nice little pocket in the middle to hold the liquid.

"Are you hurt?" I asked as I approached the monster's corpse. Megan seemed confident it was dead now. She lay on her back in the leaves, trying to catch her breath.

"Nothing serious," she replied.

"Your shield's fucked," I said, kicking it over with my foot. It was bent in on itself like a cannoli.

"Was that a giant water moccasin?"

"In my completely amateur opinion, yes."

"So that venom would have killed us." I swallowed.

"Probably…"

"We're the luckiest dumbasses on the planet."

"I don't think I would describe finding a monster snake as 'lucky.'" Megan pulled herself to her feet and didn't bother brushing the leaves off that coated her like breadcrumbs on chicken.

"We should make sure there was only one." So we searched the rest of the campgrounds, starting with a more thorough sweep of the dining hall. We found goblin bones mixed into snake scat, the pieces its stomach couldn't digest, and we realized that the papery material we saw on our way in was shed snakeskin. Both of us had seen snakeskin before, so I was surprised we didn't make the connection. Megan wasn't.

Scaled up like that, the shed snakeskin looked much different from what a garter snake left in your home garden. I didn't disagree, but I still wished I had been smarter than that. In one corner of the dining hall, we found a pile of snake eggs the size of footballs. We smashed them. Outside, Megan lingered near the monster's body with her phone out.

"We tore it up pretty good, but it looks like this snakeskin is worth a few bucks," she said, still scrolling.

"Do you know how to skin a snake?"

"Nope. We're going to learn."

"Now?"

"This video is for normal snakes, but it should be the same thing, right?" she asked as she sat in the dirt so I could watch with her.

"Sure." Megan drew her knife after a few seconds.

"I think I get the idea."