Chương 37: Asset Protection

Monday morning, in the midst of my daily ritual of doom-scrolling the moment my eyes opened, a news article caught my eye: Martin Kielar of the Mill Rats received a lifetime achievement award at the annual Pittsburgh Crawlers gala. Forty-plus years of distinguished crawling service combined with glowing nominations from his fellow Mill Rats, many of whom he mentored personally from when they were young, had made him the expected favorite for the accolade.

I wasn't naive enough to believe that professional awards were truly based on merit, but seeing Kielar's name twisted my stomach. Despite having no evidence or cause for suspicion beyond his party crawling the same night a group of crashers went missing, celebrating him felt wrong, like a betrayal of decency. If he killed those people, how many had he killed across the whole of his career?

The coverage of his award included a brief summary of his build: a level 21 black mage who specialized in crowd control spells early on and unlocked summoning magic in later levels. That meant he leaned into area-of-effect spells like barriers, entanglements, and mass debuffs. Crowd control magic was widely known as being extremely useful in crawls, but young mages especially preferred builds that dealt more direct damage. As a result, fully developed crowd control builds like Kielar's were rare.

Rare did not mean ineffective. By the time monsters pushed through his spells and reached the frontline, they were hamstrung versions of what they used to be, little more than fodder for swords, spears, and maces. The weakness of a crowd control build was their inability to eliminate enemies directly on their own, but summons solved that problem. If his usual frontliners weren't with him, he could summon his own.

The first article I read didn't name the summons he knew, but the comments were filled with people claiming he used demons. From what I understood, that wasn't necessarily unusual, but most mages chose to keep demon summons a secret. The thing that always bothered me about that is that humans were the ones who decided what monsters were "demons." In other words, these were monsters that seemed akin to what people pictured demons to be, so the name stuck.

That was all the deeper the mythological connection to demons in Earth stories actually went. But try telling my mom and dad that. To them, demons were demons. End of conversation. The creatures known as demons made the general public uneasy at best, and at worst, they revealed the summoner to be nothing but a devil-worshipping satanist. That reaction wasn't limited to the church communities either. Even the non-religious had deeply ingrained fears of demons; whether rational or irrational didn't matter.

Poor Kielar. His big award was sullied by his choice of summons. My email dinged a few times on my way into the office that morning. I checked it in the garage before I went inside. Great. I was detailed to the Mill Rats headquarters for the indefinite future. Doomers threatened retribution for Kielar's alleged demon preferences. While he didn't need our protection, the CDM had a vested interest in maintaining peace between crawlers and civilians.

My assignment said that Megan and I would be partners, which was something of a silver lining. Passing the time with her was easy enough, but then I read the last line of our instructions: Report to Enforcer Chapman on site.

"You check your email yet?" Megan asked as she joined me in walking to the elevator for the garage.

"Yep. Ever have an assignment like this before?" She shook her head.

"I didn't think the CDM would be in the conflict management business, but it makes sense, I guess. We're supposed to be the wall between crawlers and civilians. This feels more like a PR problem than anything, though." In the elevator, I leaned against the wall and aimlessly bounced around Reddit. Work started soon, but it hadn't started yet. A few memes to brighten my morning could go a long way. Reading a new headline made me groan involuntarily.

"What?" Megan asked.

"The Mill Rats have issued a statement denying that Crawler Kielar summons demons."

"Ha!"

"So you think that's as dumb as I do?" Megan nodded.

"I've never seen a denial of a thing do anything but convince people there's a cover-up."

"Same."

"Should be a fun day," Megan said with an eye roll. We arrived at the Mill Rats headquarters in the Strip District a little after 8 a. m. A group of fifteen or so protestors were already outside, shouting about eternal damnation and the dangers of blasphemy. A few police officers corralled them off to the side, but they were loud, and they struck me as unusually aggressive. One sign read, "Thank God for Dead Crawlers."

Then I saw "The Wages of Sin is Death," "The Wrath of God Comes on the Children of Disobedience," and "God Hates America."

"This is nuts," Megan said. The Mill Rats lobby was slightly less chaotic than the growing crowd outside. We found Enforcer Chapman among open laptops with a roll-away marker board behind her. A map of the immediate vicinity was taped to it, and a man with an FBI jacket made annotations. He was identifying potential terrorist targets, I realized.

"Osheski, you and Gray are being detailed to Crawler Kielar," Chapman began.

"You are to accompany him until Enforcers arrive to relieve you. If he runs a gate, you wait outside for him to come back out. If he goes into his home, you stay on the street out front. If he encounters agitators at any point, wave your CDM IDs around and encourage calm. You are not security. Your entire job is de-escalation. Keep the crawlers as well as the civilians from making this worse. Call it in if you think it's about to go bad." Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent.

Report any sightings.

"Yes, ma'am," Megan replied. The unspoken understanding underlying Chapman's orders was that Kielar was stronger than us and definitely stronger than any protestor. We didn't have a chance of restraining him or intervening in the event of violence, so our job was to be visible deterrents and voices of reason. However much good that did us. Chapman handed Megan and me radios and said, "Kielar's team is assembling in the parking garage in fifteen minutes. Meet them there. Doors are that way."

On our brief walk across the Mill Rats HQ, Megan whispered, "All this for a handful of protestors?"

"You're not familiar with these types?"

"What do you mean?" she asked in response.

"Those are Southland Church members. They protest everything. Soldiers' funerals, Unity Day at high schools. Shit like this."

"Ohh, I do know them. They try to pick fights so they can sue when someone goes off on them."

"Yep."

"Lovely." I was relieved to see we weren't the only enforcers assigned to escorting Kielar. Four other enforcers, two in a car at the front of a five-vehicle convoy and two at the very back, were accompanying us. Megan and I would be in the SUV with Kielar, and I got the sense that the other enforcers were separated from us intentionally. Their presence would receive far less attention since they were not directly next to Kielar, making it easier for them to observe and intervene if something actually went wrong.

That could also be wishful thinking on my part. CDM enforcers usually had a few levels, but could they do anything against a level 21? Doubtful. When Kielar appeared in the parking garage, wearing designer jeans, polished leather shoes, and artsy round glasses with blue lenses, he paused to look Megan and me over. He chuckled and shook his head.

"Nice of them to let you skip middle school today," he gruffed.

"This is such a farce."

"We're just following orders, sir," Megan replied.

"The favorite mantra of the weak. Let's get this over with." A Mill Rat handler drove while Megan claimed the passenger's seat, and I sat in the back with Kielar. When we emerged from the garage, the crowd was mostly as we had left it a few minutes ago, but a few bodies had joined them and brought more signs.

Several mentioned hell and devil worship, others lamented that we fight monsters by making monsters, and the most reasonable demanded greater transparency into the strength and abilities of crawlers, claiming it was a public safety issue.

"How long do I need babysitters?" Kielar asked as he scowled at protesters through his tinted windows.

"We weren't given a timeframe," I replied. Kielar and I had met before, but he didn't seem to remember.

"We were told to accompany you until we were officially relieved."

"Just great." He raised his voice to speak to the driver.

"What's on the schedule today?"

"One B-ranked run and then two training runs. One's a C, and the other is D. The B is in Homestead. They'll be ready for us by the time we arrive." Kielar nodded and spent the rest of the drive on his phone. Mostly that was tapping and scrolling, but he took two calls as well. One sounded like it might be his spouse. He assured them everything was fine and that this was standard "civvy bullshit." The other was a financial manager of some kind, I gathered.

They discussed putting an offer on a magic belt that Sotheby's recently put up for sale. I didn't catch what it did or how much it cost, but I was reasonably certain it was expensive. The B-gate straddled the backyards of two small houses. The property was steep, so other than small patios at the very back of the homes, the rest was rocky and overgrown.

The gate itself was a stone arch wide enough for two cars to pass through, but instead of a door or gate, it was bricked over with mismatched rocks and sloppy mortar joints. When we arrived, the Mill Rat harvest team was halfway through demolishing the barrier while the rest of the team chainsawed trees to clear a path to the gate. Two men in white hardhats debated if they should try and work around the houses or if it would be better to come down from the top of the hill instead.

The trek would be longer, but they wouldn't have to squeeze by residences for the totality of the harvest. When we parked, one of the Mill Rats on site directed Kielar to a trailer up the street. The rest of the party was in there, gearing up for the run. He thanked them and went to do the same. Megan and I followed and waited outside the trailer door. We could hear the entirety of the crawlers' conversation inside. Most of the discussion centered around how frustrating civilians could be.

Here they were about to risk their lives to protect the city from a dungeon surge, and the public chose to vilify them instead. Eventually, they discussed the coming run, but I was surprised by how brief that discussion ended up being. The sealed doorway was indicative of a dungeon with "contagions," as though desperate people bricked it over to ensure that whatever was inside couldn't get out. That could be undead, mind-altering spores, rot, or, in rarer cases, demons.

In terms of logistics, undead and demons were the easiest to manage. As long as the gate didn't surge, the danger to the public was minimal despite the ominous air a bricked-over gate carried. A gate with spores or rot, however, could piggyback on crawlers or harvesters to escape the gate, so they were especially tedious to manage, as they required something of a clean-room procedure for anyone or anything going in or out.

The crawlers joked that if it ended up being demons, they should let a few out to help the city appreciate the service they provided. A few moments later, the trailer door opened, and the crawlers exited one after another, all wearing gas masks. Chances are they wouldn't need them, but stepping in with them on was the safest way to confirm that. I noticed that Kielar had his scepter of Greater Fear in his hand. It looked so plain and inconsequential for what it could do.

A white metal rod with a spherical shape at the end. That was it. The frontliners wore gleaming armor etched with runes. One had an axe that glowed a soft red, and another had a spear that was as black as the jumpscare monsters from the LootLootLouis run. The casters, two black mages and a white mage based on their attire, wore loose, comfortable fabrics with several pieces of jewelry, like rings, necklaces, bracelets, and arm cuffs.

They couldn't wear armor, so they relied on enchanted items for additional protection. Kielar was one of those mages, by the way. Other than a few annoyed glances, none of the crawlers spoke to Megan and me. We followed them up the steep hill to the gate and watched the party disappear into the black. The harvest team wasn't happy about having two CDM enforcers kicking around the job site, but they didn't argue with us about our orders.

They found us a reasonably safe place where we could keep eyes on the gate without getting run over by a bulldozer. Megan and I knew better than to talk openly when we were surrounded by guildies, but our few hunting runs had made us reasonably good at communicating via eye movements alone. We agreed that this assignment was silly, but hanging out at a B-ranked gate for a few hours wasn't the worst way to spend a shift. We were both curious to learn what kind of gate this was.

The harvesters around us hoped it was demons or undead. The other possible contagions would mean several days of hard labor in hazmat suits on top of a dozen sanitization rules they would have to mind every time they went in or out. Twenty minutes after the crawlers entered, one stepped out. I couldn't hear what he said to the closest harvester, but that harvester turned and yelled, "Undead protocol!"