Chương 133: CDM 2, Chapter 1: Launch Day

My first six months at the Center for Dungeon Management weren't what I expected, but they were finally behind me. My internship had officially concluded, making me a full-fledged CDM enforcer. I counted the days to when my direct deposit would reflect the pay bump. Finances were less dire now that Beth had found her footing, but I still wanted to be there for her, especially after she lost Jonathan so suddenly.

The money still wasn't enough–somehow it never was–and working for my next CDM promotion would take time. Until then, I had another source of income: The Dungeon Diva's YouTube channel. If this next hunt didn't kill me, the channel had the potential to hit a new level of ad revenue. Admittedly, Megan's and my survival odds weren't great if we treated this hunt like a dungeon crawl. We estimated the goblin nest in the Chestnut Ridge caves to be over a hundred strong.

From the outside, we saw they had grown sophisticated enough to assign jobs to goblins–some hunted, some cut wood, some stood guard, and others whipped any goblins not working hard enough. Where the goblins I encountered in dungeon gates used improvised or salvaged weapons, these goblins crafted bows and axes. Crude bows and axes, sure, but it suggested a level of coordination and intelligence Megan and I hadn't dealt with before. Furthermore, we had no real idea how old the nest was.

Michael Domonkos, the farmer who inherited this land from his family, discovered signs of goblins months ago. How long had they been there before that? He had no idea. The longer a nest was around and the bigger it got, the more likely it was to have advanced variants. Berserkers and shamans were the most likely but also the most basic. Goblin paladins, champions, and kings were more advanced threats.

According to some out-of-print guides, goblins could eventually take on system classes, making them even more dangerous. That was a far cry from the E and D gates Megan and I were accustomed to running. Other large goblin nests had grown to be B- and A-ranked challenges. We didn't know enough about goblins to fully assess this one, but expecting it to be something two level 6 crawlers could handle alone would have been mind-bogglingly naive. For anyone else, that is.

Megan and I had something the average level 6 duo didn't: a plan built entirely from internet searches with only tangential relevance to wild goblin hunting. Don't worry, we spent less than a week on it. With that level of preparation, how could we fail? Domonkos drove us and our supplies to the end of the old reservoir access road at the foot of the Allegheny Mountains. The fall air was cold and crisp. Frost coated the tall grass along the road, glittering white and silver under the first rays of dawn.

"I want these goblins gone as much as anyone," Domonkos said, leaning against the side of his pickup in stained blue jeans and a frayed flannel shirt, "but are you two sure about this? Nothing out there is worth two kids dying for." Megan forced a smile but did a poor job of hiding her nervousness.

"We'll be okay," she managed.

"Of everything we have planned, the escape route is the most reliable," I added, reassuring myself as much as I was reassuring Megan and Domonkos.

"If it looks bad, we'll run."

"Can I help yinz carry something at least?" he asked. Domonkos jammed a pinky in his ear and twisted it around. Amazingly, his black tufts of ear hair stuck out just the same when he finally wiped the pinky on his pants. I shook my head.

"Megan likes to remind me how much higher her strength stat is. We're just putting that to work." She rolled her eyes but slipped her arms through her harness anyway. The sled behind her was loaded with gear. We had a tent, a kerosene lamp, two sleeping bags, a big cooler full of meat, six boxes of wine, two cans of gasoline, four boxes of fireworks, and a spool of barbed wire. My personal pack had a few smoke signals from a surplus store and a basic toolkit with things like hammers, screwdrivers, saws, and pliers.

Megan's pack was almost entirely smoke signals. I also had a few dozen cheap remote control lights, but I had those in a separate bag on my hip. They were usually meant for kitchen cabinets or something, and we got them from this ultra-cheap knockoff site based in Angola. Nearly all consumer manufacturing happened there, so if you didn't mind losing the brand name, you could buy just about anything.

I was against bringing the wine at first, but Megan insisted the plan would work better with wine, as long as we had lots of it. When I attempted to veto the idea, she reminded me that I insisted on all the new full-body camouflage we were wearing and that I forced that decision through despite her objection. So fine. Let's go into the goblin hunt with a few gallons of shitty wine. Whatever. On our way, I dropped one of the lights every few yards.

Once we got the bulk of the supplies across the creek, we piled them up and readied our weapons. We would come back for the rest of the gear later. The last time we were through here, we marked the trail to the caves with bright ribbons, but the goblins had torn them all down. They did the same to the first batch of ribbons a few weeks back, so this wasn't a surprise. On this front, the number of goblins worked in our favor.

So many of them came and went that a few dozen different trails all led back to the nest in the caves. We could follow them easily enough, but the first phase of our assault was to eliminate the farther-ranging goblins in the forest surrounding the cave. The last time we were here, we encountered a goblin hunting party and spotted a separate group of goblin loggers. The activity around the nest wouldn't be exactly the same now, so we needed to move slowly and carefully to avoid giving ourselves away.

Goblins could be anywhere. For the plan to have the best chance of succeeding, we needed to get to the treeline around the cave entrance without goblins raising the alarm. Previously, thirty-some goblins were right around the entrance, all doing various jobs for the nest. If even half of those came flooding into the forest before we were ready, we probably wouldn't pull this off. A few dozen yards after the creek, we heard the thunk of axes on trees.

One of the guides we read said that goblins were least active at dawn, and I thought that very noise proved that wrong. Then Megan held up three fingers. She counted three goblin lumberjacks. That was far fewer than before. Maybe there was merit to this attack-at-dawn tactic. As we circled around the goblins to cut off their route back to the nest, I listened closely. It took me longer than it took Megan, but I too counted three distinct tools at work.

When we were near enough to see them, Megan shook her head and raised a fourth finger. But that wasn't her fault. The fourth goblin carried part of a muddy nylon rope like it was a whip. It stood at the edge of the worksite, yawning and scratching its ass. When one of the lumberjack goblins paused to catch its breath, the fourth goblin hissed a warning. As soon as the ax was swinging again, the guard went back to being bored and sleepy. Perhaps these goblins were being punished for something?

To me, that was another sign of an increasingly sophisticated goblin nest. Their numbers were great enough that clear stratifications of power were in place. This scene alone confirmed that the nest had at least one leader in command, a class of enforcer goblins to make sure those commands were followed, workers to obey those commands, and then poor puds like these three lumberjacks: workers who didn't obey commands and had to be punished.

With goblins, we could assume that this leader was a more powerful variant than the others. I counted down from three, and we sprung our attack. Being a dex archer was great for situations like this. I nocked my lesser ironwood bow and put an arrow through the side of the guard's skull. My already high dex was enhanced by an ability that improved my reload speed as well as the archer class's version of the Momentum ability. Every arrow I landed, my speed increased by 1%.

As long as I kept firing and hitting in quick succession, those bonuses would stack. Four goblins wasn't a huge runway for building up speed, but that was fine. I was far faster than a regular goblin even without the buffs. My virtual archery instructor, Tailf3ther, warned me that dex archers tended to develop bad follow-through habits. Abandoning your aiming position too quickly could end up affecting your accuracy. Dropping your bow to "watch" the arrow fly was a similarly common issue.

Minding your follow-through in both cases was better for your consistency. But the whole point of a dex build was to shoot hella fast, so I was always changing targets. I hadn't quite figured out how to have good follow-through while still being the ultra-fast archer my build wanted me to be. Before the goblin guard hit the ground, I headshotted another lumberjack, put an arrow in the spine of a second as it ran, and then missed the third, my arrow thudding into a tree.

In a forest, straight lines between you and your target weren't always easy to come by. A small change in angle could put a sapling, or a branch, or a full-grown tree in the path of your arrow. That knowledge made the reality no less frustrating, of course. I wondered if the goblin had time to celebrate surviving the arrow before Megan put her sword through its chest. As soon as the last goblin went down, we crouched and waited. The only sounds in the forest were a few birds and the rustling of fall leaves.

No shouts of alarm. No swarm of angry footsteps. Still traveling slowly and cautiously, we looped around to the other side of the cavern entrance to confirm no more goblins were active in the forest. We couldn't discount the possibility that a hunting party left before we arrived and could still be out there to flank us, but searching the whole of the mountain wasn't an option. As we approached the treeline to view the cave directly, we heard the sound of goblins starting work.

They grumbled to one another in their twisted, raspy voices. Axes split firewood, and hammers struck boards. I was surprised to hear them building, but actually it was the opposite. The goblins were ripping nails out of old boards, likely stripped from an abandoned house or cabin somewhere nearby. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. The nest was getting busier, but there were twelve goblins outside instead of close to forty. Good. This was really good.

I settled into a good lookout position and gave Megan a thumbs-up. She nodded and ran back toward the creek. If either of us keyed our radios, we would know the other was in trouble. Otherwise, I had to sit and wait for Megan to do her part. Fifteen minutes later, Megan parked the sled behind me at the lookout point and started unpacking flares and smoke signals. Our next move was inspired by Leo Major, a World War II soldier from Canada who liberated an entire town–by himself.

Nazis were pretty fucking stupid, but I figured if Major could fool that many humans pre-system, then two level 6s could do the same to goblins. His strategy relied on deception. He attacked the nazi camp in such a way that the defenders believed a much larger force had them surrounded.

To accomplish that, Major did things like throw grenades from weird angles, change positions frequently before firing again, and set distant buildings ablaze with small slow fires so he would be somewhere else when they finally roared to life. You might not know this, but a civilian can't buy grenades. Instead, we bought small smoke signals and one "extreme volume" smoke signal. They were all meant to be used in emergency rescue situations and produced dense clouds of pink or orange smoke.

The guy at the surplus store said Airsoft nerds loved them, so he kept them in stock. I knew about the extreme-volume smoke signal because Nathan and I watched a video one time of a college kid setting one off in his dorm room. I felt like Major would have used those too if he had them. While I stayed on lookout directly across from the cave entrance, the apex of a crude semicircle, Megan went to one end of the treeline and pulled the cord on one smoke signal.

Staying in the cover of the treeline, she ran toward my position, dropping another as she went. As she passed behind me, I stood and started to rain arrows down onto the goblins below. Piercing Shot, an ability that allowed me to fire through one enemy to hit another, had a 10 second cooldown. Double Nocking had the same effect and cooldown but with two arrows.

I sent two arrows into and through the largest goblin in the group that was, perhaps, on its way to becoming a berserker, and then double-headshotted the smaller firewood goblin behind him. And I kept firing. A moment later, two more smoke signals sparked to life on the other side of me. Megan lit flares and firecrackers next, throwing them toward the cave, ducking, and shifting a quick ten or fifteen feet away before throwing the next, creating the illusion of them coming from all directions.

Four goblins with short spears ran out of the cave to defend the nest, but the chaos overwhelmed them as quickly as it overwhelmed the workers, many of whom were already dead. The others screamed and scrambled to get into the safety of the cave, fighting to push past the goblins running out with spears. I continued pumping arrows at the goblins. With so much open ground between the cave exit and my position, they couldn't hope to cross it alive, especially without shields.

Another batch of reinforcements burst from the cave a moment later, but they retreated almost immediately. Everywhere they looked was fire, smoke, and death. Goblins were ruthless creatures, but they were ultimately selfish. They wouldn't throw their lives away if circumstances looked grim. Megan appeared behind me with one of the gas cans.

"Status?"

"Go." With her sword and shield on her back, a gas can in one hand, and a smoke signal in the other, she ran toward the first smoke signal she dropped and approached the cave entrance from the side, hugging the mountain so no goblin inside the cave could see her coming. Her follower drone hovered over her shoulder, recording everything. A goblin would peek out occasionally, only to see an arrow speeding toward its face.

"Clear!" I yelled. Megan tossed the extreme smoke signal into the entrance of the cave and retreated behind the pile of scrapwood. As much as I would have liked to simply smoke the goblins out, the Chestnut Ridge Caves were astoundingly large. Nathan ran the math for us a few times, and he didn't see how we could ever fill five miles of cave with enough smoke. If we somehow managed to do that, we didn't know if this cave had other exits or small cracks in the ceiling for smoke to escape.

All of the accounts of armies using that tactic in the past, like Roman General Quintus Sertorius, were in small, narrow cave systems. In Sertorius' case, the Characitani hid in caves on high cliff walls. Any soldier trying to climb into the caves was quickly beaten back. Sertorius noticed that the wind blew directly into the caves, so he smoked them out to win the battle instead of risking the climb again. But those caves were tiny.

The Chestnut Caves had its share of tight spaces, but it also had–according to the maps and notes Domonkos gave us–massive open chambers. So, our smoke grenade was intended to obscure the exit. If a few goblins choked on the pink smoke, great. To keep the monsters honest, I sent an arrow into the smoke at random times. While I did that, Megan threw the scrapwood and firewood the goblins had collected into a pile in front of the entrance.

Her strength stat made tossing the fuel into place easy enough, keeping her out of any line of fire a goblin inside could have. She made sure to save pieces that were long and at least as thick as my arm. Instead of on the fire, she threw them into the open field in front of the cave, well away from the flames. We would need those later. In thirty seconds, the stack of wood was half the height and half the width of the cave. She splashed some gasoline on it and then threw the still half-full can onto the pile.

She struck a flare, ran a few feet away, and tossed it. VOOSH. I felt the wave of heat push all the way to the trees as the burn pile briefly disappeared under a black mushroom cloud. With that first ignition done, Megan turned around and resumed throwing anything and everything around the nest onto the pile or into the cave, if the angle was right. More wood. Scrap metal. A few skins left out to cure. Rocks. Sticks.

"Clear!" she yelled over her shoulder. It was my turn to run. I slung my bag of tools over my shoulder, tucked a box of fireworks under my arm, and carried the spool of barbed wire down the small hill to the cave entrance. From growing up around farms, I knew a little bit about working with barbed wire. It was unwieldy if you expected it to bend anything like string. The trick was to let the spool do the work of putting the wire in the right place.

So, I threw half the box of fireworks into the cave entrance, smiled a little bit when the high-pitched zips and bright flashes went off inside, and started with the wire. While I removed my gloves, pliers, and a hammer, Megan did the same with her own tools. With heavy leather protecting my hands, I picked up one of the long pieces of wood Megan had set aside and wrapped wire around it twice before rolling the spool a few feet through the grass to Megan.

She dropped another long board on top of the wire, wrapped it like I did mine, and then rolled the spool back to me, holding her board in place with her foot. We repeated that process six times before I cut the wire from the spool and added brackets to all the wrap points to better hold them in place. We tossed more fireworks over the burn pile and into the cave and then stood our crappy barbed wire fence upright.

Like cheerleaders stretching a banner across the field for a football team to run through, we pressed the barbed wire over the cave exit. It wasn't very sturdy, but that was fine. While I sat off to the side of the cave wrapping whatever was around with barbed wire–logs mostly, but I found a couple big rocks too–Megan set our camp up a few yards into the forest. She pitched our crappy canvas tent, rolled out our sleeping bags, and started a small campfire.

By the time she was done, I had added half a dozen barbed wire obstacles into the path of the cave. Between those, the fire, and the flimsy fence stretched over the entrance, I hoped the goblins wouldn't rush to escape the caves any time soon. When I joined Megan at the camp, I sat next to her, facing the cave to watch it, and happily accepted a bottle of water.

"That was too much running," she said.

"We need a bigger party."

"I thought you did pretty good." She scowled.

"But yeah, we do need to figure the party thing out. You and I can handle piddly nests, but challenges like these? We're really pressing our luck."

"Think about the views, though."

"I know, I know." The degenerates that watched the Dungeon Divas had better appreciate the effort here. Megan and I needed our YouTube channel to continue being successful. I reached for my radio.

"Phase 1 is complete. We're in position. I repeat, Phase 1 is complete, and we are in position."

"Roger that," Domonkos replied in a brief burst of static.

"Phase 2 then?" Megan asked. I nodded. She grinned.

"I'll grab the wine and then get lunch started." Throughout the day, we added fuel to the fire, tossed a few more batches of fireworks through the entrance, did the same with the second gas can, and made a game of lobbing stones into the cave entrance. Sometimes, we heard goblins shouting over the crackling of the flames, and on two occasions, spells shot out into the bonfire, as if to push the debris away from the exit, but we had piled up so much shit by then that the mass barely shifted.

I sat on a cooler full of raw chicken legs and breasts to watch the cave while Megan was in her sleeping bag. Our campfire burned low as the sun set. An uneaten, cooked chicken thigh sat in a cast iron pan. Our wine glasses lay on the ground where we dropped them. One of the boxes of wine sat on top of the stack with its nozzle pulled through the cardboard.

"They're moving," I whispered as I began keying my radio. On, off. On, off. On, off. The burn pile in front of the cave had subsided to the point that the goblins could push the barbed wire out of the way and skirt the outside of the flames that remained. Megan didn't reply, but she shifted in her sleeping bag to let me know she was awake.

"Ten… Fifteen… Twenty-one goblins. They're splitting into two groups to flank us from both sides, it looks like. I don't see any archers." And that was a relief. That wouldn't have ruined the plan, but it would have made it more dangerous. A few minutes later, the soft crunching of leaves reached my ears. They were getting close to the camp. I did my best to not look in the direction of the sounds, and I had to assume Megan heard them as well.

As soon as I saw a shadow within fifteen yards of the camp, I shouted, "Goblins!" Megan jumped to her feet.

"Where?!"

"All around us!"

"I don't see them!"

"There!" I shot an arrow at a shadow. I didn't hear it hit.

"We never should have done this," Megan whimpered.

"This was so dumb." The soft crunching turned to stomping. The goblins had stopped sneaking and begun to charge.

"Run!" I yelled. As we took off into the forest, leaving everything behind but our weapons and armor, I mashed the remote on my cheap-ass lights. The range was crap, so I had to be nearly on top of them for them to turn on, but they still did their job of guiding our way. We tripped a couple of times and had to cut a hard turn to get back on the trail when we overshot what we thought was the next light. The sounds of goblins giving chase–footsteps and their gleeful chittering–never stopped their pursuit.

We skidded down the slope, bolted across the creek, and ran as fast as we could to Domonkos' truck.

"Hurry!" he yelled. We threw ourselves into the bed. Domonkos slammed on the gas and sped away, nearly bouncing Megan and me out of the bed several times over. In one instance, I grabbed Megan's belt and pulled her back down when a particularly rough pothole hit her like a double bounce on a trampoline. When we finally reached a proper road, Domonkos stopped the truck and slid open the back window of the cab.

"Yinz are missing a few screws. Phew. Everyone okay back there?"

"Yeah," Megan groaned.

"I'm good too," I answered. Like Megan, I felt bruised and battered from the brief truck ride.

"Think they bought it?" he asked. I shrugged.

"We'll know in the morning."