Chương 44: Damaging Company Property

"These extremists put hardworking Americans in danger," Crawler Martin Kielar said via selfie video.

"We are a capitalist society where people have to earn their success. The demand for gates is high. The supply is low. That makes them valuable. It's basic economics. If these churches want to run gates, I have no problem with that, but stop gate crashing and play by the rules like everyone else." I really needed to stop looking at my phone the moment I woke up. The frost giants were still on the move, and nothing new had happened yet.

No one officially confirmed it, but multiple people reported that the operation to slay the giants was set to start tomorrow. Nobody would name their sources, naturally, so it was hard to say if that was true or if this was a tactic to keep viewership numbers up. My CDM email was uncharacteristically quiet. I thought for sure I'd get assigned to a security detail of some kind with tensions rising, but nope. Not a peep from any of the senior enforcers.

When I got to the office, Intern Enforcer Wilson had a theory for why our assignments were suddenly light but didn't turn around to share it until I specifically requested that she explain.

"I'm glad you asked," she said, sounding anything but glad. Her big glasses kept her curls out of her eyes, and the whole bunch seemed to bounce with every syllable she spoke.

"With the lawsuits underway, the CDM doesn't want an intern's mistake to make things worse," she explained.

"Mom and dad don't trust us enough to leave us home alone without a babysitter. Never mind that the babysitter is just going to make out with the greasy kid from down the street." Wilson spun back to face her monitor. I didn't follow up on whether or not the babysitter story was based on a real experience. It sounded like it was. If interns were benched, maybe that would mean more chances at culling unclosed gates because more of the veterans were detailed to the field in our absence. Look at me being optimistic.

Frost giants were stomping toward civilization, and I was happy that I might earn some extra XP. We interns were about to leave for lunch when Megan bumped my arm for me to wait. When the others had gone ahead, she spoke quietly.

"Have you looked at our view counts recently?"

"Umm… No, never, actually." She turned her phone screen to me. The video of our troll hunt had over a thousand views.

"I know that's a lot for us," I said, "but it's not a lot in YouTube terms."

"Still. It was like fifteen yesterday, and I assumed those were all us."

"I haven't really watched them."

"Huh?" I shrugged.

"Watching the edit the day after is enough for me. It's too weird watching myself. How often do you go back to the videos?" Megan walked away from me, following the others.

"We're going to miss lunch."

"Hey. How often?"

"I can't hear you," she answered, walking faster. Laughing, I chased after. At lunch, Nathan texted me.

"duuuuuuuuude! louis was spotted at the vancouver airport""Does that mean he's part of the frost giant fight?"

"idk but def seems like it. people are psyched online""Makes sense for them to wait until tomorrow if crawlers from Europe are flying in."

"at least if the world ends now it will be entertaining""There is that." A few seconds later, the rest of the interns exclaimed that LootLootLouis might join the frost giant battle. Not long after that, they started to debate whether the rumor that the fight was tomorrow was actually a misdirect. The battle would happen later today instead. Round and round the "analysis" went for the rest of the day. Somehow, the unconfirmed news that something might happen could be stretched into hours of coverage.

That night, a little after 8 p. m., the CDM called to offer me a D-ranked gate. That was the earliest they ever contacted me on a workday, so maybe my theory about low culler numbers was correct. Regardless of the reason behind the opportunity, I jumped on it. It ended up being my second squid gate. The first time I ran one of these, I was only level 2. In that run, my arrows felt ineffective. I'd bullseye an inker or a beaker, and they would keep coming.

My arrows seemed like they had more weight now, like they flew with greater purpose. That meant I actually contributed. The boss for that run could either be a giant slime or a giant inker, the version of squid that sprayed black ink to blind prey before beating it to death with its tentacles. This run was a giant inker, just like the first. But I was so much faster now.

I knew I needed to be careful not to push my standard-issue bow too far, but the speed boost from Momentum, which built every time one of my arrows hit the boss, was intoxicating. It felt like flooring the gas on an open highway. My senses sharpened. My focus deepened. Moving the bow was more like riding the power of my speed rather than directly controlling it. I broke my bow. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The fight was about over at that point, but I still had to stand there doing nothing for several seconds. Pretty embarrassing. It was an exceptional run for XP, though: Dorion Carmino Class: Archer Level: 5 XP Progress: 1209/1600 Str: 6 Dex: 12 Con: 6 Int: 4 Cha: 3 Abilities: Piercing Shot Traits: Ranged Accuracy Improved Reload Sharpen Momentum Spells: (none) Level 6 was within reach. If I had another run this good, I'd be there.

Whichever quartermaster was on duty was going to give me so much shit about my bow, though. No one did any real work the next day. Not just the CDM, nearly everyone in the city was preoccupied with the upcoming frost giant battle. Bartenders, however, were busier than ever. Since Beth couldn't be home to watch the battle with us, we went to her. The unofficial start time for the frost giant hunt was 9 p. m. ET.

I say unofficially because the time was widely known by the general public without any government confirming or denying it. A few people theorized that The Wilds: Alaska leaked the operation details to jack up viewership, but no one ever proved that. Nathan, Megan, and Jonathan joined me in watching coverage from a booth at Milly's. Jonathan wasn't in the mood to drink, so he got to watch the three of us progressively get more and more shitfaced.

In the lead-up to the battle, the coverage reviewed all of the crawlers who were confirmed to be participating in the hunt. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the fifty-plus crawlers were accomplished casters. Perplexing most everyone, however, was a distinct lack of fire magic specialists. That spawned all sorts of debates about why notable crawlers with those skills were absent. There were some fire specialists, to be clear, but everyone expected an army of them.

Perhaps those crawlers withheld support in protest of American and Canadian governments. Exactly one of those specialists expressed vague support for the churches suing the CDM, but the soundbite was enough to spark a sprawling theory that all fire magic specialists were protesting on behalf of the church communities. The other popular theory was gross ineptitude on the part of the governments planning the battle. Their unknown plan for the fight was clearly doomed to fail because of its obvious flaws.

I looked around for Enforcer McDouglas. He said he was a regular here, so I hoped he might be present to weigh in. He wasn't, though. When the coverage cut to some YouTube-style highlight countdown of internet clips, I pulled out my phone and scrolled, searching for any news I hadn't heard already. A small foot kicked me under the table. It was Megan, but her strike was more of a blind flail. Her eyes were locked on the screen behind the bar.

The footage was paused at an exceptionally blurry moment and seemed to be the number one entry in a top ten countdown for something. I didn't know what.

"If you weren't keeping up, they're trapped now," a voiceover said.

"They're on the third floor, and the two trolls are blocking the only exits. You won't believe how they get out of this." The footage resumed, and I saw myself spinning the gas tap on a lab bench. A moment later, I broke the gas pipe along the wall, which I watched from Megan's perspective at first but then cut to my view for when it finally came loose. I slid into the classroom with Megan and shut the flare in the door–pull cord on my side, the body of the flare on the other. The video paused again.

"Not all of you did well in high school science, so let me interrupt to explain what's happened here. Those valves on the benches release gas for bunsen burners and other science-y stuff. That broken pipe was the gas line, and that little tube shut in the door was a flare. Is the math mathing for you yet?" The video started to play. The screen shook. When a clear view returned, the room next door was on fire, and the trolls were in a panic. The commentator interrupted again.

Why was this talk-show format the standard for content now? Just let us watch the fight!

"That, folks, was an explosion. Trolls are weak against fire, so this is good for the crawlers, but don't get too excited. It doesn't go exactly as planned." The sprinklers kicked on. We stabbed the first troll, killed it with flares, and then watched from Megan's perspective as my bow broke, at which point she jumped out the third-story window to land on the troll. The stream replayed that moment five times over. Two commentators appeared on screen.

"People sleep on wild monster hunting, but you'll never see action like that in a dungeon. I get that the meta for crawl streams is dungeons, so that's what everyone does, but why is that the meta? Who decided that? I don't think wild monster hunting ever got a fair chance to go mainstream. Those videos are all proof that was a mistake. Subscribe to our channel for more top 10 crawler highlights!" My phone buzzed. Megan had texted me a screenshot of our view count. We were over four hundred thousand.

When I looked up, she stared at me, wide-eyed. I didn't immediately see any emotion except for shock. Was she upset or happy about this? Maybe she didn't know yet. I didn't know yet either, I realized.

"Dorion," she said carefully, "can I speak to you outside?" Jonathan looked around the table suspiciously. He wasn't blind. He wasn't an idiot. And I was willing to bet I did a worse job than Megan at hiding my reaction to that specific video. Of us all, Beth did the absolute worst. Her jaw was practically on the bar as she stared in our direction. She was one of the first people to have ever seen that video and was flabbergasted to see it on a television in a bar. Nathan, however, played it cool.

He kept watching television and sipping beer like he had been doing all night. A few moments later and a little ways down the street, Megan turned to me.

"What do we do?!" she hissed.

"About what? I think you did a good job of hiding our identities."

"No, what do we do with the opportunity? We're going to get ad revenue from this at a minimum, but isn't this the part where influencers double down and make a career out of content?" I raised my hands.

"Take it slow. You think the opportunity is that big?"

"Put 'Dungeon Divas' into search." I did. Several news sites turned the video into a story, and more than a few articles debated our potential identities.

"I wish we would have chosen something other than 'Dungeon Divas' now," I said.

"People love it."

"Okay, so say there's something here, what's the move? Sell t-shirts?" Megan shrugged.

"I don't know the playbook for this. Did our CDM contracts say anything about second jobs or income sources or media appearances?"

"Didn't you read it?"

"Did you?"

"... No."

"That's the first thing we check," she said.

"If we aren't allowed to do this and be CDM, then we're going to have to talk about quitting the agency."

"Easy, easy. Let's not jump too far into the future here. I agree with you that checking our contracts first is a good idea. Now, the way my life works, the frost giant fight started the second we left the bar. If we don't want to miss all of it, we should get back."

"Is it too late to change the name of our channel?" I asked on our way inside. Megan laughed.

"It is most definitely way too late. You're officially a Dungeon Diva."