Chương 42: Workplace Conflicts

The dungeon had no built-in light sources like torches or glowing rocks. The CDM set up a batch of floodlights just inside, but everything beyond their reach was perfect darkness. All of the dungeons I had run at that point in my career were corridors and rooms. Whether it was termites or goblins, the path through was relatively straightforward. The monsters appeared in waves as we went deeper, and any of them going unnoticed was virtually impossible. This dungeon was part cave, part forest.

The ground beneath my feet was dirt and rock, but the chamber was expansive enough that I couldn't immediately see any of the walls other than the one surrounding the gate at my back. Ahead, all I could see were trees, thick and gnarled, rising high above me. When my headlamp played across the canopy, the light never reached the ceiling of the cavern.

"The cull team said this area was clear," Grensmith said, "but everyone keep your guard up. We don't need a scraggler adding more death to this scene." In dungeons like these, where getting lost was a genuine possibility, crawl teams breadcrumbed their way through to make it easier to backtrack when the time came. This team used spray paint and bright yellow ribbons. Here and there were the bodies of monsters. Some were wolves, and others were hairy humanoids with gray skin and twisted faces.

The wolf corpses were large, but they didn't strike me as large enough to be a dire variety–not that I had seen a dire wolf in person to know for sure. The humanoids were the real clue. Some were more wolf than person when I looked closely. A lycanthrope dungeon then? A few minutes later, we came to the first crawler body. They were face down with a gruesome crater in their back. Something hot and explosive had ripped right through their leather.

I could have been editorializing, but it seemed to me this crawler was running deeper into the dungeon when they were hit. A wallet sat next to the body with a driver's license out. The investigation team had been through here already, so anything of interest had a numbered tag next to it. This body didn't have a crawler ID, however. Only the driver's license. That likely made this person a crasher. Did the werewolves circle behind the crashers somehow, giving them no choice but to run deeper?

The same thing had happened to Megan and me with the trolls. We had to go the wrong way to escape the immediate danger. Werewolf casters were a thing, but they typically wore baubles and talismans of some kind. Bones, beads, ears. Those sorts of things. None of the werewolves I saw so far had any such indicators. Ten minutes farther in, still surrounded by trees and darkness, we stepped into the scene of a large skirmish. At first, finding any order in the chaos didn't seem possible.

Crawler and werewolf corpses were scattered in every direction. Blood splattered across trees and pooled in thick puddles around bodies and severed limbs. Some of the werewolves were cut down by weapons. Others were charred from fire or lightning magic. The crawlers were similarly mangled, but the types of wounds were more varied on the people. Some died to claws and bites, their necks ripped open by ferocious teeth or their stomachs unzipped by vicious scratches. Others had cleaner deaths.

A few died from spells, like the first crasher we saw, and others had clearly been slashed or stabbed by human weapons. The density of the trees made it difficult to view the scene in its entirety, so I couldn't immediately discern the order in which these deaths occurred or what direction monsters, crawlers, and crashers had been traveling when the fighting began. Attempting to narrow my focus, I looked at the IDs next to the crawler corpses.

After a few bodies, a pattern emerged: the crawlers without licenses–crashers, presumably–weren't killed by teeth and claws. The wounds were the clean cuts of sharp blades or the gory remnants of spells striking flesh. The crawlers with licenses were the opposite. Everyone that I saw had quite obviously been killed by a werewolf. Their wounds were shredded and torn, the result of something wild and savage. In terms of numbers, there were four to five werewolf corpses for every dead person.

Grensmith motioned for me to follow him. Pausing at the far side of the scene, he pointed to a trail of blood that went away from the fighting and deeper into the dungeon.

"This trail goes another hundred feet or so into the dungeon, stops at a severed arm, and then doubles back. When the cullers got here, there were seven werewolves still alive. The cullers are watching the boss room now, by the way, so we have as much time as we need." I nodded as I listened.

"I want to hear your theory when we're done," he said to me before turning to address the rest of the recovery crew.

"The investigators have been through and tagged everything. We are clear to clean up, but do your best to keep from mixing crawler remains when you bag. That makes life a lot harder for the coroners later." After a few months with the CDM, my stomach was more resilient than before, but bagging pieces of dead people still disturbed me deeply. I found myself attempting to dissociate, to let my body do the physical work while my mind went somewhere else, somewhere without blood and entrails.

Two of the enforcers, men I didn't know, joked through the whole process. Jokes like, "Do you need a hand?" one asked as they offered a severed forearm, or "This guy must have been a smoker. Look at those lungs. Doesn't he know those things will kill you?" I was still too new to know the difference between callous disrespect and the desperate use of gallows humor to dull the sense of horror at seeing and handling so much death. I knew, however, that gallows humor wasn't for me.

My method of escape was trying to puzzle out what transpired here. Grensmith had given me all the pieces, so I sat at a table in my mind and moved them around, looking for the configuration where everything fit perfectly. If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. It took us two hours to bag all the remains and another half hour to shuttle the various bags to the exit.

My stoic facade fractured when I picked up a torso–two arms but no legs–to carry it out. Wrapping my arms around it felt like hugging a person. That awareness of humanity crashed through my poise. I had to step into the forest to empty my stomach for a few minutes. Nobody bothered me about it. I wasn't the first person to retch on this recovery mission. Outside, I stripped off my plastics, put them in the biohazard disposal bins, and drank some water the investigation team had in the back of their vans.

Grensmith found me sitting on the hood of my car.

"Got a theory?" he asked.

"I think so."

"Let's hear it." After a deep breath, I began, "The crashers were already inside when the crawlers arrived. It's not clear who started it, but the two groups fought, and the crawlers outmatched the crashers significantly. One of the crashers, carrying their own arm, ran deeper into the dungeon and pulled a bunch of the spawn. They dragged the monsters back to the crawlers and were lucky enough to slip away in the mayhem. The one-armed crasher exited the gate and hopped the guardrail to run."

"If you had to decide who attacked first, crawlers or crashers, who would you say?"

"Crawlers. The first dead crasher we found was hit in the back, so they must have tried to run when they saw crawlers." Grensmith nodded approvingly.

"I suspect the cops will find the crasher dead in a ditch not far from here. That kind of blood loss wouldn't let them get very far."

"Right."

"Good work. Head back to the office, file your report, and you're done for the day. Sorry to ruin your weekend."

As far as I knew, Iron Crawlers weren't suspects in any previous crasher killings, but then again, we had very few definitive cases of missing crashers to work from, meaning we had no true sense for how pervasive the problem might be. I didn't see signs of mercy in that scene. To me, it looked like the Iron Crawlers attacked the crashers on sight, intending to wipe them out completely. They were too bloodthirsty, though, and didn't respect the danger the dungeon itself presented.

The armless crasher must have brought half the dungeon back with them, and the crawlers were out of formation and unprepared. Maybe crasher slayings weren't rare at all. Maybe killing crashers was the unspoken standard operating procedure across guilds and teams, and the rest of the country was just ignorant of that fact. In a normal run, the harvesters coming in behind the Iron Crawlers weren't likely to find crasher bodies unless they went looking for them.

The dungeon forest was large enough that most of the harvesters would never see any signs of fighting. The few who did see corpses wouldn't go poking around at dead werewolves. A couple of dead crashers at the bottom of that pile would never be seen, and then they were gone forever when the gate closed. When I finished typing up my report, with all of these thoughts still swirling in my mind, I looked up the crawlers who died in the incident. Each one had a clean record, both as crawlers and as citizens.

No fights, no disputes, no complaints. Their social media was pictures of backyard barbecues, smiling children, and cute pets. None of them looked like murderers, yet I had seen the corpse of a crasher killed while trying to run, not fight. If the one-armed crasher managed to survive, by some miracle, who would believe the story that they were the victims, not the crawlers? A whole party of upstanding professionals were more trustworthy than a criminal, even in death. When I got home, Nathan was on the couch.

"Dude! You been following this?!" I stepped into the living room with a beer.

"Following what? I've been in a gate most of the day." Nathan's face fell when he saw mine.

"Rough one, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Sorry, man."

"It's fine," I said.

"What's happening?"

"This is a livestream from The Wilds: Alaska. They just ran from frost giants and are hiding out in an old mining town." Livestream? That was odd. Like most reality shows, The Wilds series was edited before airing. I had never heard of them launching an unscheduled livestream on a random Sunday afternoon. The more pressing question: Frost giants?! Those were S-ranked dungeon bosses when they were alone, and I definitely heard Nathan use the plural just now.

I was about to ask Nathan to tell me more, but the footage on the screen cut away from crawlers huddling in the darkness to a recap that included video from earlier in the day. The crawlers were traveling north on AK-2, also known as the Elliott Highway. They passed an abandoned gold mining town named Livengood and continued on for another mile before coming to a quarry where AK-2 connected to AK-11. A voiceover on the stream explained, "This is footage from a scouting drone.

The quarry was not a scheduled point of interest, but such places are common locations for monster nests." The drone soared over a dense coniferous forest. The start of the quarry was a stark line. The trees disappeared and became harshly cut stone.

"Watch carefully. It happens quickly." The camera suddenly went white and then died.

"If we go frame by frame, we see this." A blue humanoid wrapped in furs and wearing a mastodon-like skull as a helmet extended a hand and blasted the drone with an ice spell. The camera managed to capture just two frames of the monster, but even a little blurry, it was easy to identify.

"A second scouting drone, traveling far higher than the first, confirmed that this was a frost giant." The stream showed three humanoids, one smaller than the other two. Two ice-blue lizards accompanied them.

"This is the first documented sighting of frost giants outside of gates, and it is the first time giants of any type have been observed traveling with salamanders that appear to be pets. A single frost giant is an S-ranked encounter, and frost salamanders are upper A-ranked." The second drone was shot down too.

"Nuts, right?" Nathan asked, his eyes glued to the screen.

"The crawl team ran, of course, and they sent out an emergency call for help. Apparently the U. S. and Canada are scrambling teams to help, but that's twelve hours away in the very best case scenario. There are rainstorms moving through because it's fall, and that's going to cause some delays, it looks like."

"Those giants have to be pre-satellite," I said.

"I don't remember the last time an S-ranked gate in North America sat long enough to surge."

"That's what they've been saying on stream too," Nathan replied.

"They think the smaller one is a child, which makes it a frost giant family. No one has seen that happen before either." An S-ranked monster, when provoked, was on par with the power of a category five hurricane. If those giants continued south, Canada was in trouble. None of the crawlers manning the wild walls were prepared for a fight of this magnitude. The commentary stopped abruptly and cut back to the livestream.

"They know we're here," one of the crawlers whispered in the dark.