Chương 175: CDM 3, Chapter 51: College Towns

I shut the door to my apartment. My apartment. I had my own bedroom, my own bathroom, and a living room. The common area, kitchen, and lounge would likely be where I spent most of my leisure time, but this place belonged to me. I didn't have to share it. I wasn't on a countdown timer for when the shelter would kick me out. Whenever I wanted, I could close that door and escape to my own private world. Home. I had a home.

Everything still had the smell of fresh construction, a strong aroma of paint with notes of sawdust and drywall. I had relatively few belongings to move in, so my every move still echoed in the mostly empty space, giving it a sense of emptiness I didn't like. That would change in time, I knew, but I was ready for this to feel like a forever home. Listen to me. A "forever home" like I was a dog, hoping I would get adopted.

Nathan and Megan had begun sleeping in their new place, but they had quite a bit to move from Megan's apartment. Beth and de Saint planned to relocate in the next few days. For my sister's part, she still had little in the way of Earthly belongings, so she wouldn't need long. De Saint, however, warned us that she really liked books–which we already knew–and apologized in advance for how many heavy boxes she would have. I felt a pang of sadness.

I knew it would hit me eventually, and I was surprised it had taken this long. Despite all the odds and the enormity of the obstacles that were in my path, I succeeded. I was financially stable. I had a meaningful career. I had friends and mentors. And I drove an ice cream truck. In that moment, all I wanted was to call my mom and dad and share all of this with them. I wished I could tell them about the amazing things I had seen and the wild adventures I had. I visited mainland China.

The Army escorted me around South America. I survived ogres, shadow hunters, wraiths, and wisps. I had a voidwood bow, and I had played a small part in helping Beth start her own career as an apprentice bowyer. Mom, Dad, isn't that great? Can you believe your son managed to do all of that? Do you want to see all of the pictures, videos, and news articles? Can I give you a tour of the new guild house? Would you like to meet my friends? They're incredible people. I know you'll love them. I rubbed my eyes.

Someday, I would learn to stop doing this to myself. No, I probably wouldn't. I had a similar thought at eighteen years old, and this had only gotten harder, not easier. De Saint texted the group chat.

"Domestic Dungeons is blowing up about drakes and salamanders in Canada. Sweden, Finland, and Norway are seeing a bump too, but I think there are just more people around to see them in Canada." She attached cellphone photos and brief videos of frost drakes soaring in the sky like hawks. One photo showed three of them in a field eating sheep. They had landed on the herd and turned it into a lamb chop buffet. Another video was filmed by an elementary school teacher.

She had taken her students outside for recess and saw the shadow of a drake pass over her. By the time she got her phone out, the drake had already gone by, but she managed to capture it banking right with a Tim Hortons sign in the foreground. I brought up the Domestic Dungeons feed de Saint pulled these from. The majority of the posts were citizens fearing the consequences of frost drake encroachment.

They worried that their local governments weren't prepared to repel what some people described as "flying crocodiles who use ice magic," and dozens of posts questioned the wisdom of airlines continuing to operate when such beasts flew in the same skies.

"yeah dudes, if we could keep drakes off the diva menu for a while, that'd be great."

"Kimmy can't tank a drake?" de Saint teased.

"What about vampires?" Beth asked and linked a news article from that morning. A vampire "cult" had been discovered in New York City. Police were conducting a sting to catch predators targeting underage girls online, and one of their undercover officers ended up finding vampires instead. They killed him before backup could arrive, but he was spared being eaten. Whatever that was worth.

The werewolf commune I had seen videos of before was quick to argue that their effort was specifically designed to prevent this sort of tragedy. If afflicted individuals don't have a safe place to go, they might join groups like this cult simply because they lack any other viable options. When society at large casts you out, you could go it alone or fall in with whatever community was willing to accept who and what you were.

"I gotta say I'm not at all interested in hunting Earth vampires or Earth werewolves," Megan said.

"These werewolf influencers make a lot of sense, and I'd rather we give people a chance to figure out how to live with lycanthropy than immediately assume they're evil."

"That's assuming it can be controlled," I added. Megan linked me to a series of Instagram videos.

"These are the same people practicing 'form control.' They say werewolves can learn to manage it to the point of living normal lives." This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. I clicked into the first video. It opened with a montage of various people meditating before cutting to a nighttime shot of a middle-aged man sitting on a stool inside of what looked like an old zoo enclosure.

A voice off-camera coached him to breathe as black hair began to sprout from his skin and his face and hands twisted and contorted, bone and muscle reshaping themselves into a wolf. When the man was, perhaps, halfway through his transformation, he threw the stool across the enclosure and started to roar and howl. The same voice from before spoke in calming words, repeating the man's name followed by reminders that he had a wife and two children.

It took a few tense moments of slobbery snarls, but the man, nearly full wolf at this point, calmed. The hackles of his fur relaxed. His ears went from flat with anger to upright and aware. A moment later, the wolf responded to the human voice and followed a number of commands to prove the person inside was indeed in control.

"Wow. This is amazing."

"I wonder how much of the psychosis is chemically driven," de Saint mused.

"explain real slow for the kids in the back plz."

"Wraith Touch is essentially a giant spike in dopamine, right? A werewolf transformation changes a person's physiology almost instantly. Eyesight, smell, hearing, taste–those are major adjustments. Similarly, what does turning on a faucet of wolf hormones do to a human mind?"

"sounds like they need prof rainy on the case doing studies."

"I would love that actually."

"you can have a pet werewolf in the guild house, but he has to be crate trained, and there's a big pet deposit you don't get back. if he makes too much noise while you're at work, you'll have to get him a bark collar or something." Beth texted me separately.

"Did you see this?" The preview text read, "CDM insider claims candidate for governor is an active murder suspect." I clicked into the article. A source from the CDM has informed DungeonFeed that governor hopeful George Baker is a suspect in an active murder investigation. The high-profile crawler and one of the "Heroes of Arsenal Park" who cleared a recent S gate in Pittsburgh is linked to the disappearance of more than a dozen suspected gate crashers.

The evidence the CDM has gathered against Baker is circumstantial, according to our source, so no basis for bringing charges yet exists. These alleged murders took place prior to Baker being filmed in an undercover CDM operation threatening to kill crashers, a high-profile case that saw Baker briefly imprisoned before being cleared of any wrongdoing.

This case was one of the major motivations behind what is known colloquially as the "Baker Bill," a change in dungeon gate law that some critics claim "legalized the murder of gate crashers."

"I have not seen this," I replied to Beth.

"Does something like this hurt his chances to be governor?"

"I think there's a demographic who would vote for him specifically because he killed gate crashers."

"That's sad."

"Yeah, it is."

"Can we get a bow with a Fire enchantment and burn down all his dumb signs?"

"I wish." De Saint texted the group chat again.

"Uhh… guys? These posts started popping up in the Domestic Dungeons scraper." I opened her screenshot. Two TikTokers uploaded videos of gnolls, hyena-like humanoids, bounding across what looked like the well-kept grass of a private university during a foggy night. The posts went up within seconds of each other. Someone on Facebook said, "Gnolls on the loose! GTFO out of Grove City!"

The official Twitter account for the Grove City police announced that they suspected an active dungeon surge and that everyone should shelter in place. My shoes were on, and I was out my apartment door before my phone buzzed. The Cold Rollers were getting called in.

"No McDouglas?" Giago asked as he climbed into the van. He was the last one to arrive at the garage but was only a few seconds behind Hornby.

"He's 'out of the office,'" Megan replied. Giago rolled his eyes. Megan shrugged.

"Yeah, I know. Frustrates me too." Nathan pulled out of the garage while Megan twisted in the passenger seat to address the rest of us in the back.

"Chapman is in the RAID office and will help us coordinate. Blast Furnace is 20 minutes away, so they'll be on the ground first. According to RAID footage, 43 gnolls surged out of a D gate. Local crawlers have been picking them off, and so far the casualty count looks like 5, which isn't terrible for a gate surge.

"They're spreading out pretty quickly, so our job is going to be a lot of search and destroy. We'll split into pairs–me and Gray, Hornby and Giago–and hunt them down one by one with RAID support. Kimmy and Rainy are going to manage comms. The pairs on the ground will be on separate channels to avoid crosstalk. If we need to be on the same channel, Kimmy and Rainy will let us know.

"This is a college town, and spring semester is still in, so assume that civilians are everywhere, and do what you can to minimize property damage. Gray, Giago: You have the ranged attacks most likely to cause unintended damage. Let's be selective with void arrows, and stick to Ice and Stone spells so we don't accidentally burn anything down. Rainy, got anything new for us?"

"The gate was on the outskirts of the city on the east side. It looks like most of the surge went toward the town, but there is nothing but trees and farmland in the other direction. The RAID drone on-site tracked at least 7 that appeared to go that way, but we only had the one drone. RAID opted to keep eyes on the gnolls going into town, so we don't know where that batch went." I had Grove City up on my phone, and de Saint wasn't exaggerating. The land to the east of the city was completely unpopulated.

The next nearest town was about 4 miles in that direction, but it hadn't been inhabited since the 60s. Otherwise, it was forest with dots of farmland here and there. The chances of us tracking every gnoll that disappeared into that wilderness were slim. I suspected we would have to return to this area a few times over the next year or so to cull packs of wild gnolls, the offspring of the monsters we would inevitably miss on this run.

"If we take down more gnolls than Blast Furnace, the next night of drinks is on me," Megan said. Giago patted his stomach.

"Are you sure you can afford that? I can drink a lot of beer." Megan laughed.

"You get tipsy after two. I could drink you under the table."

"Alright, Osheski. We're going to beat the pants off of Blast Furnace, and then I'm going to demolish you in a drinking contest. You weigh like what, 115 pounds?"

"I'll weigh around 320 pounds by the time the night is over."

"Huh? Why's that?" Megan grinned.

"Because I'll be carrying your ass."