Chương 84: CDM 2, Chapter 20: Legacy Documentation

"Yes, Enforcer Gray?" Enforcer Grensmith asked when I stepped into his office and shut the door.

"If you're not allowed to answer or don't want to, I understand, but I wanted to ask about your build."

"There's nothing top secret about it," he answered.

"What do you want to know?"

"Did they have set build plans for each class, or how did that work?"

"The CDM made a build plan for each of us to follow."

"Optimized for wild monsters?"

"Correct," Grensmith said.

"Does that documentation exist somewhere? I'd be curious to see what the builds looked like." He set his chin in his hand and thought.

"I can't think of any reason they would be restricted. If I have some time today, I'll see if I can dig them up."

"Only if it's not any trouble."

"None at all. Nice running with you last night. Your form was noticeably technical. Most people get into the double-digit levels before they realize they can benefit from that kind of training. Are you working with anyone local?"

"No. I send this YouTuber a video of my technique every couple of weeks, and he gives me stuff to work on. A lot of times he sends a video back to explain what he wants me to fix."

"Really?" Grensmith asked, recoiling slightly in surprise.

"How long have you been doing that?"

"A few months now. I think it's helped."

"Fascinating. Yeah, I'd say it has. Well, I won't keep you." I dipped my head and met up with Enforcer Cortez. We were scheduled to be in the field that day for harvest inspections, so after checking in at the RAID room, we drove out to our first assignment.

"That C gate was something else," he said before we even got out of the garage. Cortez must have been dying to talk about the run all night.

"You happy you did it?"

"Brother, yes. Hell yes. I only need like two more D gates to get to level 10, so I'm happy about the XP, but seeing McDouglas in action was wild."

"What do you mean?"

"I didn't catch him using a single ability, but by the time any of us got to a monster, it was already pretty chopped up. He carried us. No way around it. And he did it without breaking a sweat."

"You knew more about his reputation than I did," I said.

"Did you hear anything about his build?"

"Nope. Just that he was the right person to have on your side. What do you know about his build?"

"Not a thing." Cortez whistled.

"Nobody ever talks about CDM spooks, but they have to be out there. That George Baker arrest? A CDM was undercover as a crasher. I mean, what? The CDM does undercover investigations now?"

"Yeah, I haven't heard any other examples of that either."

"It had to be a local CDM guy. Sounds like something a spook like McDouglas would be good at."

"Or woman."

"Right. Oh, man!" Cortez's seatbelt strained a moment from his burst of excitement.

"We haven't talked about Kimmy! That's so freaking funny that the new Dungeon Diva is a drone."

"You think?"

"You didn't like it?"

"I thought it was great." Cortez nodded.

"The extra camera in the mix is a nice touch, and it seemed to make them more confident too."

"I noticed that as well, but yeah, I didn't realize how much a fourth camera would help. The follower drone they had already was nice, but the free-roaming view was slick." And I wasn't lying. I really did think it upped the quality of our content substantially. For his first attempt at this, Nathan got some good angles, like a wide view of us approaching the house, and then alternate angles of us fighting seen through open windows.

Megan's editing wove those moments in at all the right times, and that's an important factor to emphasize. I doubt the jump in production value would have shone through without her touch.

"It would be cool if they started traveling more," Cortez added.

"Head to different places to hunt other types of monsters."

"Like what?"

"They might not have the levels for it, but Yellowstone has had some dire wolf sightings. That'd be a cool hunt."

"I hadn't heard that," I said. No way were we chasing after dire wolves anytime soon. That would be suicidal. Cortez shrugged.

"I guess they've suspected for a while but never laid eyes on one to confirm it. Been a few scarabs in New Mexico. Oh, speaking of Mexico, did you hear about the troll dungeon under Puebla? That's a-""I read about it. Trolls were using old tunnels."

"Crazy, right? Man, New Yorkers have been talking about monsters under the city forever. After what they found in Puebla, makes me think that maybe some of the stories are true."

"Pretty much every large city has stories like that," I said.

"Is it a monster or is it a serial killer? Nobody knows." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Cortez's phone rang. The conversation was brief, and what I could hear of it was limited to Cortez's "uh huhs." When he hung up, he reached for the dashboard GPS and started entering an address.

"One of our drones might have been shot down, and we're supposed to go get it."

"Shot down? By what?"

"That's unknown. If we find it, I bet the damage will answer that question. How long do you think an ultra-expensive piece of government tech would go untouched in the middle of a city?" I laughed.

"Probably not long, but I'd be impressed if it landed anywhere in the open. What are the chances it doesn't go through someone's roof?"

"True. True." The phone rang again. A minute later, Cortez hung up and said, "You called it. 911 just got a report about a drone falling through a roof." He updated the address in the GPS. We were already on our way to the drone's last known location, but now we could drive directly to the crash. Cortez had to step away from the scene. The drone had crashed into an Etna house on a steep city street. The fire department beat us there, but they packed up now.

An elderly man and woman had lived here, and as soon as the first responders confirmed that both known occupants were deceased, the house became a crime scene. Someone destroyed a piece of government hardware and unintentionally killed two innocent people in the process. Our job was to monitor the drone until CDM investigators arrived. Enforcer Chapman was gravely concerned about pieces of our equipment walking off with someone, so I stared at the wreckage for more than an hour to be certain that didn't happen.

I wanted an excuse not to, but Cortez had struggled with the scene from the moment we arrived. If I broke too, no one would be left to watch the wreckage like we were ordered. The drone landed in a bedroom of a small house with a front yard packed tight with little concrete and plastic figurines. The man of the house looked as if he were in bed at the time, and the crash was more or less a direct hit that killed him instantly.

His remains didn't go flying, but you could clearly see the impact had broken him into pieces. I was really happy when his severed leg stopped twitching. The woman was in the hallway right outside of the bedroom, and the collapse of the house got her rather than the drone itself. The firefighters said it appeared as if she had tried to free herself, which meant she survived the initial impact and passed away buried under her own house.

"Sorry," Cortez said when he returned.

"Take as much time as you need."

"I'm good now. See any clues about what took it down?" I shook my head.

"Looks like a pile of broken drone to me." Cortez laughed.

"Fair."

"Enforcer Gray." Inspector Dempson had appeared by my side. I shook his hand and introduced him to Cortez.

"Has anyone disturbed the scene?" Dempson asked.

"First responders looked for survivors, but nobody after that. The neighbors have been gawking, so they might have seen if anyone got to the drone before we did."

"Appreciate it," Dempson said.

"Those poor people. Decades on the planet, and something falls out of the sky just for them." I didn't know what to say.

"The Inspection Team will take it from here. We'll keep RAID in the loop once we get into it." Cortez and I got back in the car. We still had harvest sites to inspect. Our last inspection of the day was a Mill Rats C gate. The drone crash put us far enough behind that the small break Cortez and I had between this shift and the start of our RAID overnight was long gone. We would technically be late to RAID, but Enforcer Chapman was not entirely unreasonable, fortunately.

She knew we were redirected for the first chunk of the day and didn't hold that against us. But man, I wished I would get that hour to sit down and let my brain do nothing but stare at a table in whatever diner or fast-food joint was my poison of choice that evening. That last C gate was a mess too. It appeared in an alley of a densely packed North Hills neighborhood, closing two different streets to give harvesters space to work with, which ultimately wasn't much space at all.

When I first saw this gate on our inspection schedule, I was surprised the Mill Rats bought it in the first place, but then I looked at the bidding history. None of the major outfits in the city wanted anything to do with the logistics nightmare, it looked like. An indie crawl team bid on it a few times, but the Mill Rats found the ceiling of their budget and pushed until the indies couldn't bid anymore. What was too expensive for an indie crawl team was still a steal of a price for a C gate for the Mill Rats.

Since the harvest site was split between two streets, that's how Cortez and I divided up the inspection. He took one. I took the other. I couldn't immediately determine what kind of dungeon this was, but I guessed it was a wilderness setting of some kind based on the piles of timber stacking up on trucks. Most of it looked like the dungeon's version of hardwood. The species of tree wasn't the same as what we had on Earth, but the wood they provided was akin to walnut. That's not something I knew on my own.

I heard one of the harvesters make that comparison as I made my rounds. The harvesters had also found ironwood, I learned. Only two of the trees in the whole dungeon were ironwood, but that was still a decently profitable find for the Mill Rats. Seeing a stack of timber worth more than I'd make in 5 years was a strange feeling. Dead plants being more valuable than you were was a powerful reminder of your place in the world. Martin Kielar made sure to add his own reminder to make it especially clear where I stood.

My focus was on my tablet, my fingers pecking out a basic description of the weather at the time of the inspection–cold and wet, if you're curious–when an arm wrapped around my shoulders.

"Enforcer Carmino," Kielar said, hugging me close with a big smile.

"Always good to see one of the CDM's finest watching over our gates." The smile was sincere, but the joy came from sticking it to a CDM grunt who put his nose where it didn't belong. It was the grin of an evil clown, not of a friend.

"Crawler Kielar, hello," I replied. When I attempted to remove myself, his grip on my shoulder tightened.

"I consider it a compliment that you see as much potential in my nephew as I do," he continued.

"He's not very social, though. Now that he has declined your offer, I trust there's no need to bother him any more?"

"You're correct. He wasn't the man I thought he was." Dorion, you fucking asshole. This is one of the strongest crawlers in the city, someone who has quite literally gotten away with murder on multiple occasions, and you can't keep yourself from mouthing off. The bones in my shoulder felt as though they might crumple beneath Kielar's grip. Kielar laughed.

"You're always such a kidder, Carmino. If you ever have questions about Mill Rats, my door is always open. With how often our paths cross, you could always wait for me to find you, if that's how you wanted to do it." His big hand patted me on the back.

"Have a good rest of your day, Enforcer. Always good to see you." As soon as Kielar's back was turned, I slipped between two box trucks and went back to the SUV. With my head between my legs, I tried to force my breathing to slow and my stomach to calm. What bullshit that the CDM forced low-level enforcers to deal with monsters like that. He could end my life with his levels or with his wealth, neither of which I had any real chance of surviving. I could never really stand up to him.

He would win any kind of fight I could start, handily. The door opened.

"You good?" Cortez asked.

"Yeah. Got a little dizzy for a second. You wrapped up?"

"Yep. Let's go babysit the droids."