Chương 34: Liability

For the next week, all I did was data entry, ten hours a day, every day. I could have limited that to eight and left work at a normal hour. Instead, I decided to demonstrate my commitment to my work and the CDM. Whether or not anyone noticed, I can't say. If it gave me a chance to recover my momentum, however, I was willing to put in the time. That Saturday, Megan and I went after an SOC at the McVille Airport, which was north of the city on the Allegheny River.

Megan guessed it was probably for small private aircraft rather than anything remotely commercial, like hobbyist pilots who didn't need much more than a runway and a place to store their planes. We searched the structures on the property, one aircraft hangar and a small office building, but when we came up empty, an unsettling feeling washed over both of us.

If the EPA marked this place as an SOC but we found no signs of goblins ever having been here or evidence of the EPA having formally visited this site, the list of alternative explanations was short. This SOC could be a false alarm, a mistaken report that was flagged for investigation but had no real merit. Or, this SOC could be the home for a monster that wasn't as brash as goblins. Like a troll. So we got out of there. That felt like a waste of a Saturday, but a bad tip was likely to come up eventually.

And I had a reason to be excited for the week to come: Monday was my physical and mental evaluation to determine if I was fit enough to resume fieldwork and voluntary culls. If McDouglas wasn't blowing smoke, there was a chance I could start running gates again. A standard doctor's physical was more thorough than the CDM evaluation. She read my chart, asked me how healing had gone, and then asked if I felt ready to go back to fieldwork. And we were done.

The psychological evaluation was slightly more rigorous, but the line of questioning seemed less concerned about my well-being and more about CDM liability. They wanted to confirm I wasn't suicidal or holding some sort of grudge for the CDM or for the crawler who hit me. I expected the questions to focus more on my mental state after having been assaulted because of my job, but nope. My ability to say I wouldn't kill myself was all the evidence they needed as far as my safety and health were concerned.

But whatever. It was behind me, and I could return to proper fieldwork. That kicked off with Lofold and me getting assigned to audit harvester inspections. That wasn't my favorite assignment, but it got me out of the office and near active dungeon gates. I still didn't have the training or the clearance to do safety inspections inside of dungeons, but being around a few piles of monster corpses was more thrilling for me than it probably should have been.

Toward the end of that Monday, we visited a B-ranked gate in a suburb of Bridgeville, a town just south of Pittsburgh. A vault door, like something from a bank but more rustic, appeared in the parking lot of a drugstore. It was the most spacious harvest site we had seen that day, and the Allegheny Dungeon Extractors had the gate rights. They were one of the more corporate guilds in the city and generally took worker safety seriously. This particular dungeon was a cursed castle surrounded by a dark bog.

The trees that grew in the bog were exceptionally hardy, and their timber fetched a good price. The castle itself had a number of decorative elements worth salvaging, like statues and tapestries. The throne room was made of marble, which was more valuable than terrestrial marble. Apparently, dungeon marble was self-healing, absorbed sound, and was never cold to the touch. Lofold and I split the site down the middle, and I had just finished my half.

As I ventured back to the car, our agreed-upon meeting place, a truck caught my eye. It was a standard pickup with a truck bed water container. Water trucks in general weren't uncommon for harvest operations. Sometimes they used water to keep dust levels down. Sometimes they needed to rinse people, materials, and equipment coming out of a gate.

And sometimes they were used to control the temperature of certain pieces of equipment, like a drill bit that generated intense heat from how fast it cut through whatever needed to be harvested. By all accounts, this truck was wholly unremarkable, which was why I walked past it the first time. Now, though, I noticed that the container was an opaque blue. I was used to seeing semi-transparent white jugs, which made checking the waterline simple and easy.

The spigot on this jug was taped over, like someone was trying to prevent leaks at the expense of any usability whatsoever. Interesting. The seal at the top of the jug was taped over too. Nothing I've described thus far was an infraction. It was just strange. Taping a water jug shut at both ends seemed to hinder the basic practicality and purpose of having it on a jobsite in the first place. Buying an opaque container added an unnecessary layer of difficulty to its most basic application.

And now that I looked more closely, I saw no signs of hoses, pumps, or buckets nearby. That wasn't necessarily nefarious, but what good was a water jug you couldn't open and couldn't empty in some meaningful way?

"Do you know what's in this?" I asked, grabbing a harvester on their way by.

"Water?"

"You're not sure?" The harvester shrugged.

"It's not my truck. I can get a supervisor for you."

"Please." A few minutes later, a pudgy man in a white hardhat approached.

"How can I help you, enforcer?"

"What are you storing in here?"

"I'd guess water."

"You're not sure?"

"It's a big operation, and I'm not a robot. If you want to take a look, you're welcome to." Opening unlabeled containers on a worksite with potentially hazardous materials was against protocol. Even a relatively safe chemical could knock you on your ass if you popped the lid and got a lungful of whatever gas escaped. If it was less than relatively safe, the consequences could be serious for you and for everyone in the area. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"You know that I'm not permitted to do that," I replied to the white hardhat.

"If you can't confirm the contents, please find me someone who can." I did my best to keep my back straight and my voice firm. Being a disciplinarian of any sort didn't come naturally for me, and most of the foremen and site managers reminded me of deacons from my church, which is to say they were clearly my elders. By default, that made them above me in social hierarchies. In the church. Not out in the real world on a harvest site. But the mental conditioning was tough for me to shake.

I texted Lofold to let him know I would need an extra minute. He joined me a short while later. I was still waiting for someone from the guild to arrive and open the container.

"The water buffalo caught your eye?" he asked, circling the truck.

"Yeah. Am I crazy that it's a little strange?" Lofold shook his head.

"Not crazy. I've never seen one of these taped up like this." He put two hands on the side of the tank and pushed. The truck bed rocked back and forth.

"Definitely not empty," he added.

"Enforcer Meyers and I were on a site a few weeks back that had a whole truckload of improperly secured barrels. Nitric acid, cyanide, and a few solvents I don't remember the names of. A few of them weren't even labelled." All of those chemicals, while hazardous, were useful for extracting certain materials during a mining operation. When I first heard lists like that, I too couldn't imagine any reason to have cyanide on a job site, but it was apparently somewhat common.

The foreman approached, accompanied by a worker in gloves, goggles, and a respirator. I wondered whether the foreman took safety more seriously when his workers were involved or if the worker had to stick up for himself the way I did. Seeing a gas detector on his chest–a small device that looked a little bit like a handheld radio–gave me some measure of comfort. I trusted an automated device more than I trusted any random human.

Climbing into the bed, the worker used a box cutter to get through the tape and, with significant effort, unscrewed the large plastic cap. As soon as the seal exhaled, the gas detector alarm went off. Lofold and I stepped several feet back as the worker slammed the lid back on and tightened it as quickly as he could.

"I can keep an eye on things here if you want to call it in," Lofold offered. As I stepped away to do just that, I saw the foreman doing the same. He seemed caught off guard by this discovery, but I was terrible at guessing when someone was sincere or was simply a good liar. Since no one could confirm the contents, the CDM confiscated the entire truck, loading it into a flatbed and transporting it to a safer location for further evaluation.

The next morning, I got an email updating me on the findings so I could finish my citations and my report. Someone had collected over one hundred gallons of slime corpses. These particular slimes were known as "blights" because their bodies were so horrifically poisonous that plant life shriveled and died the moment they came into contact with the monster. Blights sometimes appeared in dungeons with bogs, but not always.

From the CDM's perspective, transporting blight remains was equivalent to transporting a biological weapon. Harvesting them was permitted, but doing so required a rigorous process of costly reports and safeguards that could quickly eat up the profit potential of collecting blights in the first place. You could make far more money ducking all of those procedures and selling the blights under the table. Was this a guild-level decision on the part of the Allegheny Dungeon Extractors? That was unlikely.

Their operation was so large that they stood to lose more than they could gain from breaking so many rules. That explanation wasn't completely out of the question, but the more plausible theory was that a few of the harvesters saw a chance to make extra money and squirreled the blights away without management's knowing. Those were questions for the investigation team to answer. My part in this was done as soon as I finalized my report and the initial citation.

The seriousness of this incident meant that it might not be fully resolved for months, so it would be a while before I heard anything else, if I heard anything at all. Still, this was a good catch for an intern to make. Grensmith told me, "Nice one," as he passed by the intern cube later that day. I didn't see McDouglas or Meyers that day. I saw Chapman, but she was still ignoring me. I doubted I would ever receive praise from her ever again after how badly I screwed up.

That night, I got called in to clear a D-ranked gate. It ended up being a vermin dungeon with giant rat variants. These specific variants were under a form of permanent Berserk. They were faster, more aggressive, and harder to kill than a typical giant rat would be. Not all that exciting, but that didn't matter to me. The fact that I got a call in the first place relieved my lingering fear that Chapman would get me shadowbanned. I would have celebrated a Roach Run in this case, to be honest.

If I was still leveling, not all hope was lost. Progressing to level 5 on that run further bolstered my sense of relief. I should have waited until the morning to do my allocations, but I couldn't. I sat in my car, still soaked in sweat from the run, and dropped 2 points into dexterity and 1 into intelligence, continuing to follow my build guide.

Next, I reviewed my new unlock options: Silent Arrow Class: Archer Type: Trait Cooldown: None Duration: Perpetual The draw of your bow and the flight of your arrows are permanently silenced, as is the impact of your arrow. Farsight Class: Archer Type: Trait Cooldown: None Duration: Perpetual Your ability to see and distinguish objects at a distance is greatly improved, equivalent to 6x magnification.

Momentum Class: Archer Type: Trait Cooldown: None Duration: Perpetual Gain a 1% boost to reload and draw speed for each successful ranged attack delivered in rapid succession. Momentum expires if you fail to hit an enemy with a ranged attack after 2 seconds. When I first chose the dex archer build, I knew that Momentum would be an important unlock, but I greatly underestimated its potential. Seeing Megan use the brawler version of Momentum showed me how powerful it could be.

The melee Momentum trait stacked bigger bonuses with each successful hit, but an archer was in a far better position to begin and continue a streak of successful hits. Furthermore, Piercing Shot could count as two hits, so I would get a 1% boost from the first enemy and then another 1% from the second. Later in my build, when I eliminated the cooldown completely, every arrow would be a Piercing Shot by default, so any single arrow could translate to a 2% speed boost.

I selected Momentum and reviewed my system profile: Dorion Carmino Class: Archer Level: 5 XP Progress: 33/1600 Str: 6 Dex: 12 Con: 6 Int: 4 Cha: 3 Abilities: Piercing Shot Traits: Ranged Accuracy Improved Reload Sharpen Momentum Spells: (none) Level 5. What a beautiful sight.