Chương 99: CDM 2, Chapter 35: Data Security

The next day, I worked late again. Megan was off that evening. She texted,"Did you happen to look at our footage from Taiwan?"

"Nope."

"Did you mess with the files at all?"

"No… What's going on?"

"The footage of the raiders is gone. I checked your helmet camera and mine. Remember that footprint from the first trip? That footage is missing too."

"You think they would go that far?"

"There were lots of times where we didn't have our gear with us. I can't think of what else it would be. No way both of our cameras glitch out at the exact same time, let alone twice."

"That's so sketchy. I understand why they didn't want us having that, but to mess with our shit without asking?"

"What should we do?"

"What could we do? A super well-funded government contractor deleted some video. There's no one to complain to."

"And rocking the boat might cost us the Nad-Nade sponsorship."

"To be clear, that whole situation was fucked up. Now it's our word against theirs if we ever say anything."

"Assholes. Lesson learned. We need to make secret backups if we ever travel like that again."

"Would you have posted the footage if we had it?"

"Idk. I thought about it but didn't decide anything. Would you have been against posting?"

"I don't know either. I think I've tried to keep it out of my mind instead of actually facing it."

"They did attack us."

"I know."

"Alright sorry to bug ya. We're all set for scouting the mine again tomorrow. I'll let you know if we see anything cool." And I went back to watching footage. Megan told me Nathan's plan for dealing with the nest was "incredible" but wouldn't give me any specifics. Our next shared day off was five days from now, and Nathan wanted to be sure he could get all of the supplies we needed by then. Neither he nor Megan would tell me what those supplies were. My EPA contact emailed me back.

She said they sent a team to investigate a troll tip in the area recently but didn't see any signs of troll activity. Their assessment of the drone footage was that the figure was a person. Maybe they wanted a look at the gate or were homeless and camped in the area. But no trolls. Nothing came of the second drake wing harvest site, by the way. I started on the frost worm video, which was an Iron Crawlers gate.

Since they were a team rather than a guild, these harvesters were from independent operations that contracted with the Iron Crawlers. In my mind, independent contractors were more likely to gamble on moving harvests under the table. Guilds had several managers and supervisors in the chain because one organization managed the whole operation end to end. A contractor only had to worry about the people on their crew.

If the offenders weren't operating at the organizational level but rather were rogue workers out to make themselves an extra buck, that theory went out the window. Something like that could happen inside of any company, team or guild alike. When I got home that night, having spent another day finding absolutely nothing, I saw drone footage any time I closed my eyes. Nathan picked up a second shift, so I was in the apartment by myself. I tried to turn on a show and a few streams, but nothing could hold my attention.

The puzzle Dempson had given me was challenging but also potentially impossible. RAID hadn't been online for long, so by simple chance maybe we had no proof that Pittsburgh harvesters were acquiring dungeon resources under the table. Whether or not we recorded at the right time didn't mean the problem wasn't there, but if all my digging came up with nothing, I would never know if it really was nothing or I missed something important.

I had a few trainings left from the list Dempson sent me, but none of those would cover the materials at the focus of my search: drake wings, titanboa skins, and frost worms. They would definitely be useful later, but I started to wonder if I wasn't informed enough about any of these items or monsters. As soon as I noticed that potential blind spot, it was all I could think about. Starting with frost worms, I tried to learn everything I could. They were predators that hunted like the more well-known sandworms.

They ate anything they could swallow. In the wilds, they had been observed hunting seals and polar bear cubs. Part of their digestion process was freezing what they ate, at which point it dissolved the food via a mechanism akin to stomach acid, except frost worms didn't have stomach acid. To this day, no one has been able to explain how that step of their digestion worked. Frostworms were opportunist hunters. Their meat was poisonous if ingested by humans. In dungeons, large fish and yetis were their predators.

Rumors of an ice worm eating skiers in the Alps had existed since the 1980s, with multiple "sightings" of the monster in action but none that were verifiable. A guy in Florida got busted trying to breed frost worms in captivity. Authorities discovered him when a neighbor reported a suspiciously high number of freezers going into the house. Titanboa skin was both a performance and a fashion material. A crawler was once swallowed by one, and his party found him still alive when they managed to kill it.

Titanboas hunted fish as often as they hunted mammals. Dragon toads ate titanboas. There was also some very specific adult content popular with titanboa enthusiasts. And that was when I decided I was done reading for the night. I had clicked one search result too far, and I could never take it back. I spent so much time watching drone footage that I started to get migraines.

Having searched and searched fruitlessly for so long, I decided I needed a break, so instead of working on my day off, I kept my plans to go hunting wild goblins. This was also going to be my first time hunting with Beth. She had a few levels now, and Nathan's plan for conquering the Banning #2 Mine very much needed a fourth set of hands. When Nathan first explained his idea, I pictured nothing like what you see in that video.

He said we'd pump water, and we'd use the old railroad tracks so we could more easily roll the equipment into position. In my mind, I saw something like a pushcart. I didn't see the actual equipment until the day of the hunt. As we approached the railroad tracks north of Banning #2 Mines, Nathan told me to stop. The sun was only barely starting to rise, so the row of headlights ahead was hard to miss.

Down the street were two long flatbed trailers, two trucks to pull them, and a third truck that looked like it was part bucket truck, part crane.

"This sucks," I said, thinking someone crashed our site.

"No, they're with us," Nathan replied.

"Put your helmets on so they don't see your faces."

"Nathan…"

"Bro. I got it. We're all good." I put on my helmet, and Megan and Beth did the same. Nathan didn't have a helmet and didn't bother covering his face.

"Is that where you want us to unload?" a man in Carharts asked, looking through the driver's side window to speak to Nathan.

"Yep."

"Pointing South?" Nathan nodded.

"Pointing South."

"Got it. Might be best if you turned around here and parked a few car lengths up the road. We'll need space to finagle this." I did as I was told but was still very much confused by what was happening. We cut my dumbfoundedness from the video in part because it didn't read well through my helmet and also because Nathan didn't want to get sued by one of the biggest equipment rental companies in the region by making it obvious where all this came from.

Later when she edited the footage of this hunt, Megan blurred all the logos painted on the equipment. The rental company was unaware that Nathan's LLC was a sole proprietorship he used for his side jobs.

They saw that Bignate Industries had the proper insurance and was willing to pay in cash upfront, and that was enough for them to provide three water pumps, two of which were bigger than our apartment building's washing machines, a crane truck for unloading them, a flatbed railcar to put them on, two coils of what looked like oversized fire hoses, and then a rail truck to pull it all. The rental company didn't provide the guys helping. Those were Nathan's construction buddies with CDLs–commercial driver's licenses.

A rail truck is a pickup outfitted with train wheels so it can be "driven" on railroad tracks, so when our pumps were on the rail car, we had a way to pull everything down the tracks toward the goblin nest. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Technically, Nathan hadn't lied about the plan whatsoever, but he grossly misrepresented the scale of his plan's execution. This was insane.

"How much did this cost?" I whispered to Nathan.

"I pulled some strings."

"Where the hell did you get the strings?" Nathan put a hand on my shoulder.

"The plan is still the same, and I took care of all this already. You need to keep your focus on killing goblins. Don't let this distract you."

"I will have a lot of questions when we're done."

"Sure. Right now, game face, bro." He was right. I needed my head in the right place. I had heard the plan and agreed to it, and nothing I saw here made me doubt whether or not it would work. I didn't understand how it was possible, but I still believed in the plan. With all three pumps on the railcar and the railcar hitched to the rail truck, Megan, Beth, and I climbed into the bed of the pickup.

Nathan told his friends that we'd be back in three or four hours at most, then he climbed into the cab with his laptop and drone controls. Kimmy took to the sky and flew ahead.

"No activity yet," Nathan said. Hearing him speak in person while it also came through my headset was jarring, but that effect disappeared when he shut the truck door.

"Are we ready to do this?" he asked. Megan watched Beth and me nod.

"We're ready," Megan replied.

"Your boyfriend is crazy," Beth whispered as we drove down the tracks. The Youghiogheny River was to my left, and the Banning #2 Mine was ahead through the trees on my right. Megan grinned.

"I know. Isn't it great?" After a few minutes of travel, I heard Nathan in my ear.

"We're like 30 seconds away. Still no nest movement." A concrete structure half buried in leaves and snow sat within the naked winter woods. It grew larger, little by little, as we approached.

"Maybe 10 seconds. No, more like 5… Go!" The truck stopped, and we sprang into action, each knowing exactly what our job was. Beth stood with one foot on the roof of the truck cab, an arrow already nocked. She kept watch as Megan grabbed a coil of hose larger than her and took off toward the mine. While Megan ran the hose, Nathan and I took the third pump, the smaller of the three, and carried it down to the edge of the river.

For this to work, we needed this pump to help the water go uphill when we triggered the larger two. I slipped at the bottom, dipping half of my left leg in the river. The sudden cold felt like getting bitten by an animal. It started sharp and then locked its jaws.

"You okay?" Nathan asked as we got our end of the hose in the water.

"I'll be fine. I'm just an idiot." We scrambled back up the riverbank. With my dexterity as high as it was, I was at the truck when Nathan was only three steps into the climb. I jumped onto the railcar with the pumps. I learned how to use these less than five minutes ago. Thankfully, most of the complexity was pre-set. I started the generator but waited to activate the pumps. When I was a kid, our generator was gas-powered. The one that came with our pumps was far more expensive and ran on mana crystals.

Where the generator I remembered was loud enough that half the house shook when it ran, this one was almost perfectly silent. I waited. A moment later, Beth turned to me.

"Megan's signaling. You're clear." I turned the pumps on. As Nathan neared the truck, I gave him a thumbs up. He nodded and jumped into the cab to take over piloting Kimmy.

"We got movement already," he announced.

"I count 7, but they look confused. Okay, they made us. 5 of them are to the right of the hose. The other 2 are on the left." For this phase of the plan, the goal was to protect the hose. From scouting the location previously, Nathan identified the goblin tunnel closest to the tracks. A hose was presently stuffed into that tunnel, pumping gallons of freezing river water into the goblin nest. The first wave fell quickly and easily, but then the nest really came to life.

"20 to 25," Nathan reported.

"They're coming out of the different tunnels." That many goblin feet crunching through snow sounded like an approaching storm, a whisper of a hiss growing into raging chaos as they charged. Steam rose from their bodies, their naturally high body temperatures at odds with the below-freezing climate, giving their approach an otherworldly, ethereal effect. I tried to let no more than four goblins reach Megan at any given time.

If a goblin closed on her and she was still under four, I switched my focus to goblins that were farther away. We had discussed this tactical decision before, and we both agreed that putting an arrow in a goblin that Megan could just as easily stab was a waste of our ranged advantage. For what it's worth, my YouTube mentor Tailf3ther agreed with that strategy, and he was the only real archer giving me any sort of advice. I trusted it. Fighting the instinct to immediately "help" Megan was tough at first.

She was my friend, and goblins wanted to kill her. By the sixth or seventh goblin corpse slumped at her feet, I found myself more comfortable with this approach. Beth pitched in here too, but she was largely there for backup. If we needed to retreat, she would cover us, or if goblins somehow got close to the pumps, she could take them out.

"There's a swarm coming out of the main structure," Nathan warned.

"20… 30… 35 goblins total. They're moving in a clump." That was a lot of goblins, but Megan and I were both level 10 now. On two occasions, she had to use her Knockback or Outnumbered ability to buy herself some extra space to work. Otherwise, she chopped them down as quickly as they came while I put Piercing and Multi-Shot to use. If I could fire into a group, I was pretty much guaranteed two goblin kills for any one arrow. They were rare at first, but I started to spot goblins that were wet and shivering.

We hadn't pumped nearly enough water out of the river to flood an entire mine system, but seeing signs that at least part of the nest was affected boosted my confidence in the plan.

"More goblins are coming out of the main structure," Nathan reported, "but they aren't charging. They're massing."

"How many?" Megan asked over her radio, her voice tense and strained from speaking while fighting. I caught a glimpse of Kimmy dipping low toward the mine for a better look.

"Shit. Uhh… 20ish grunts. 15 archers. 4 berserkers. 2 shamans. They're moving as a unit now."

"Beth, Dorion," Megan began.

"Focus archers and shamans. Let the others mob me." I protested.

"No way. That's nuts."

"Trust me. Please listen." The silence in my headset spoke volumes. I knew that Megan was the only one who was okay with this plan, but this was not a point to argue. The goblins were already on the move.

"Roger that," I said. Megan shimmered for a moment. Holy shit. Did she just Taunt 20+ goblins? She had no melee backup. If she got overrun, none of us would be able to get to her in time, if we could get to her at all. I had to trust her, I reminded myself. So, I did what she asked and focused my efforts on archers. I couldn't see the shamans yet, but I knew I'd see them soon. The swarm closing on Megan was like a flashflood bearing down on a lone hiker, a force of nature that drew its power from pure volume.

I was about to abandon Megan's call and help with the mob when she dropped her sword and shield. In a flash, she squatted low, grabbed the hose, and pulled it out of the tunnel. Her exceptional strength stat made that maneuver look easier than it was. The force of the water surging through the hose would have been too much for any normal person to wrangle, but Megan tucked it under her arm, set her stance, and turned the water on the goblins.

The freezing river water blasted the frontline right off of their feet, and they didn't get back up. The second row stumbled and hesitated. Many of the goblins tried to flee, but the monsters at the back of the pack still pressed forward, blocking the escape of their allies. The scene had shifted so quickly that the goblins at the rear didn't comprehend the challenge just ahead.

"Dorion," Nathan called.

"Shamans to your 10 'o'clock." Shit. They were still too far, and they were getting ready to cast on Megan. I ran deeper into the forest. A wave of buffs washed over the goblins attacking Megan, and then two fireballs shot in my direction. I bobbed to avoid them and started to fire back.

"Berserkers closing from your 2 o'clock!" Three berserkers wielding scrap metal axes bore down on me with glee. They covered ground more quickly and were far closer than I anticipated. The first swung at me, but his movements felt slow and sloppy. I shifted back out of range and then sidestepped a chop from another. A flash of electricity crackled in my periphery. I pivoted to dodge another blow, putting one of the berserkers between me and the shamans. My timing was on point.

The Bolt hit the berserker in the back. It didn't die, but it was down. Academically, I knew I was in danger, but my mind was calm. I felt fully in control and fully aware of my situation. Berserkers weren't faster than me. By the time they swung, I was already gone. A memory flashed in my mind of the barbarian crawler that broke my nose. I slipped his attacks with ease as well but lost my advantage when he grabbed me. So I needed to keep moving. Slip. Slip. Slip. Dual Nocking.

Two arrows went through the head of one berserker and embedded in the face of a shaman behind. The third berserker hesitated when one of Beth's arrows struck it in the back. I kicked its lead leg out to immobilize it and shuffled backward, setting my sights on the final shaman. Three arrows later, it was dead. It may have been dead after the first, but I wanted to be thorough.

"Back to the truck!" Nathan yelled, his panic loud in my ear.

"Back, back, back! There's a champion!" I was relieved to see Megan drop the hose back in the hole and retreat. Not all of the grunts were down, but she had flattened the majority of them, and she looked unharmed. I ran after her.

"Go, go, go!" Nathan insisted.

"Beth! Kill the pump and disconnect the hoses!" I didn't dare turn around. I snagged Megan's arm as I ran by and dragged her with me. Nathan had the rail truck in reverse even before we leapt into the bed. He floored the gas, retracing the path we took to get here. The champion reminded me of a broader, more muscular ogre. It had the twisted features of a goblin and was covered in scars. One of its steps was three of mine, and it ran at us with hateful determination.

The sledgehammer in its hand looked small inside of the champion's fist. He gained on us quickly, chasing us down the railroad tracks. I nocked and loosed. Again, and again, and again. Thanks to my Momentum ability, my speed increased with every successful hit, and the champion was a big target. I just kept firing. Every step it took toward me and my family, it ate four arrows. Then five. Then six. I couldn't even feel my arms anymore. I trusted the system and kept pushing myself to go faster, faster, faster.

At the time, I had no idea this was happening, but Megan was on her knees with her arms wrapped around my waist, steadying me as the truck zoomed backward. At the same time, Beth dumped her arrows into my quiver to ensure I had enough. I neither felt nor noticed any of that happening in the moment, but watching the replay made it obvious that their help was critical. The champion slowed, staggered, and fell face-first onto the tracks.

"Stop!" Megan called. Nathan slammed on the breaks. Beth bounced off the cab while my dexterity surfed the sudden lurch. Megan jumped over the cab, ran down the hood, and stabbed the shit out of the champion. It was dead.