Chương 109: CDM 2, Chapter 45: Experience

Prepping to manage an S-ranked gate surge filled the CDM with carefully managed chaos. I'd like to say that my role in that work was critically meaningful, but the only people I outranked were interns. The scale of the potential disaster facing us brought out dozens of people with far more experience and authority than I had. At first, Enforcer Cortez and I got to be the RAID experts, which is to say we knew where buttons were and what they did.

A few hours into the circus, we were reassigned to harvest site inspections. We didn't have the skills or the knowledge to justify our presence in the RAID room, so we got sent to do work for which we were qualified. Getting pushed out the door like that didn't feel great. We had been there from the start of all this, and that fostered a sense of ownership. I was invested in this gate. I spent days doing nothing but tasks related to the gate. Ripping me away so abruptly felt like being cheated.

But my feelings weren't what mattered here. Lives were at risk, and given the choice between my experience level and someone who had been working with military drones for a decade, I was the clear loser. The most interesting behind-the-scenes morsel I can share is that the debate over whether or not to send more crawlers into the gate was intense. The structure of an S-ranked dungeon often meant that such a plan wasn't practical. The star dragon dungeon, for example, was massive.

Simply getting from the entrance to the boss room would take too much travel time. In the case of this gate, the physical distance was manageable, but the shifting room states presented a difficult complication. As soon as another team was in the dungeon, both teams would have to move more slowly to avoid repeating the tragedy of the science team. Some argued that risk was warranted, but ultimately, it was decided that the response effort would wait outside of the gate. If the gate surged, they would be ready.

48 hours before the gate was closed, a solution to the dungeon puzzle was found. The crawlers now knew the exact sequence of buttons to press, and they had an ideal route to follow. In some places, that route meant significant detours, but those detours were justified if they meant skipping a respawn. The crawlers themselves didn't come up with this plan, by the way. Most people believe the collective efforts of the internet covered the majority of the ground.

Then the government picked it up and polished the final 5%. I don't know for sure one way or another, but that was my impression from the inside as well. The solution was imperfect, however. The most optimistic projections estimated at least 30 hours of movement to gain access to the boss room. If the crawlers had to repeat the puzzle in reverse to get out, the gate would close before they escaped. The crawlers reached the boss room door at hour 37 of 48.

Cortez and I were in the field inspecting a harvest site at the time. We had orders to return to the CDM and gear up to fight a surge at hour 40. To me, 8 hours was too narrow a window for something so important, but that's what we were told. We huddled around a laptop screen with a dozen harvesters to watch the boss fight, and I couldn't tell who bounced out of nervousness and who bounced to fight back the winter cold. In my case, it was both.

The boss room door had the same seamless stone look as any other blocked doorway in the dungeon. In those cases, the stone wasn't a door but rather the foundation of a now raised room. That was likely true here as well, but whether or not that mattered was unknown. A pillar, the same dimensions as all the other control nodes in the dungeon, stood in front of the door. A small square of red sat in the middle.

Lou Jackson, who had not once acknowledged or interacted with the cameras the way Martin Kielar and George Baker did, now addressed the stream.

"There's no such thing as a safe dungeon run," Jackson began. He sounded tired, resigned.

"Every crawler knows that, and no one knows it better than crawlers like the ones around me now. These are professionals who have done it all and seen it all. We all knew walking into this that one or all of us could die. This is war, and there's no escaping that fact.

"We are all aware that this could be the end for us. We may not have time to get out of the dungeon before the gate closes. We understand that, and we accept that. While our futures may not be certain, one thing we know for sure: We will defeat the boss on the other side of that door. We will win, and we will close the gate. Even if we're not around to celebrate with all of you great people out there, know that we don't regret our sacrifice.

"We're going to turn off the stream for 20 minutes so we can prepare in private. When the video is back, you'll be following us into our destinies. Thank you, everyone. Love you all." The stream cut to a "Be right back…" slide that felt more appropriate for a gamer taking a bathroom break than for crawlers staring down impending death. The marketing team hadn't planned for this outcome, it seemed. When the frost giant battle was imminent, I remember noticing how quiet and still the city got.

For all the people stacked on top of one another, thousands of individual lives with their own goals and their own problems, this was something that united us. Our fates were tied. The most important thing in our lives was playing out on our screens. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. A few people attempted to joke during the downtime, but they were met with glares or were outright ignored.

For the majority of that wait, I didn't hear anything but sniffling noses, scratchy coughs, and the wind whipping between city buildings. When the stream came back online, everyone–myself included–lurched forward. Jackson had already hit the button, lowering the door, and we followed the crawlers inside. Whoever was producing the stream had the idea to take chat off the screen entirely, and I was grateful for that.

According to the grid we had seen hundreds of times over across the last several days, the boss room was the same size as every other chamber in the dungeon, roughly three miles wide and three miles long. That seemed to be the case here, but instead of a unique biome, the space was surprisingly barren. A stepped pyramid rose up out of the center of the room, but the area around it was a perfectly flat stone floor. No hills. No buildings. No obstacles of any kind. Just a pyramid in the distance.

The camera cut to a scouting drone zooming across the chamber. The pyramid had 13 levels and a familiar waist-high column with a square ruby button at the very top. Each level of the structure was ringed with monster statues, positioned shoulder to shoulder. The base level was goblins, followed by kobolds, followed by hobgoblins, and then bugbears, and so on. The final three levels were wyverns, then a demon-like monster species no one recognized, and then finally four cyclopses surrounded the pillar.

To give you a better idea of scale, El Castillo is the most famous Mayan pyramid. Any time you see pictures of a stepped Mayan pyramid in a textbook, it's El Castillo, so you've seen it even if you don't remember its name. El Castillo has 9 steps. If you added four more base levels, that's how big this dungeon pyramid was. The goblin statues on the first level came to life and began crossing the chamber to greet the crawlers. Then the next level of kobolds did the same.

A few minutes after that, the level of hobgoblins followed suit.

"That's a fucking army," Cortez said to himself in a hushed voice. As I imagine everyone else did at that time, I pictured all those monsters running through the streets of Pittsburgh. The drone cameras didn't last long. In minutes, the only perspectives we had were helmet cams, and they were virtually unwatchable. Even the wizards of the party endlessly ducked and dodged attacks, making every angle of the battle a shaky, blurry perspective that only occasionally stilled before moving again.

Those still moments were a mess of statues. The stone wyverns could fly, so they bore down from above. The caster classes among the various types of monsters lobbed spells over the sea of warriors pressing to overrun the crawlers. And the view pixelated, returning to frenetic spins, bounces, and shakes. Even if no one could understand what they saw, none of us dared look away from the screen. Seventeen long minutes into the battle, every statue in the room froze.

Any of the flying monsters, like the wyverns, fell out of the sky and shattered into hundreds of pieces. Nothing moved when those fragments finished bouncing across the floor. The crawlers were as confused as the viewers, looking around the chamber with their weapons up and their spells ready.

"It's done," Lou Jackson said off camera. Despite his obvious fatigue, he spoke with conviction, with certainty.

"Time is against us, but I would rather die trying to return to my family than wait here for death to collect me." The crawlers gathered their three dead, one Mill Rat and two Furious Few, none of whom were Kielar or Baker, slung them over their shoulders, and ran out of the boss room. Two rooms toward the exit, the city collectively relaxed. The dungeon had transitioned to a state where every room was lowered, and all of the spawn was gone.

The trek would still be a long one, but with no barriers or enemies in the way, they would exit the gate with time to spare. If you're wondering why or how the boss battle ended, so were we. With their focus on escaping, none of the crawlers stopped to explain it to the stream. The full story wouldn't come out for another five hours. I've told you before that Lou Jackson was a level 27 druid, and I'm worried I didn't give his legend as much attention as it deserves.

I never met him personally, but let me give you an idea of how impressive his level alone was: The XP gap between level 26 and 27 is 3, 355, 443, 200. No, I didn't fuck up with my commas. That's an insane amount of XP, which is why so few crawlers have ever gotten that far. The only way to earn that much XP in a lifetime is to run a ton of S gates. That Christmas S gate was number 53 for Jackson. For Kielar and Baker, it was their second. Per-crawler XP for an S gate was 100, 000, 000 on the low end.

Jackson held the record for some time at over 600, 000, 000. A few years back, an S gate in Africa topped that by an additional 100, 000, 000. To run such an absurd number of S gates, Jackson had to be obsessive. At first, he paid other crawl teams to let him come along, but after running several S gates, he developed a reputation of being an experienced asset for S-ranked crawls.

He still bought his way in occasionally, but once his value was known, he could offer to join the run at no cost–paying him in XP only–and most parties would accept. His presence upped the survival chances of everyone else present, making the extra XP split a good investment. That experience was invaluable when danger was at its highest, and for a stretch when he was younger, Jackson flew around the world to run multiple S gates a month.

Rick Young, the crawler leading the New Eden initiative, did something similar with wild gates to reach the same level. So, when the rest of the crawlers in that battle with the statues thought about how to defeat all the monsters, Jackson thought about how to press that button at the top of the pyramid. He summoned a raven, told it what to do, and turned his attention to staying alive. The raven flew through the chamber and hit the button, ending the battle. A level 3 druid spell took down an S-ranked dungeon.