Chương 55: Customer Retention

On the ride home after our first day with Domonkos, Megan raised a concern: "Are we going to lose viewers if we do a video without actually killing something?"

"I'd guess so."

"That's bad if we want the channel to keep growing."

"We could drop this cave project and stick to SOCs if we want more certainty about finding wild monsters." Megan propped an elbow on the passenger door and leaned her head into her hand.

"After the snake, it's hard not to think we're asking to get bit if we keep doing things that way."

"Agreed."

"Ugh, this sucks."

"I don't want to get killed trying to appease viewers, to be clear, but I feel the pressure too. Frank could drop Beth's apprenticeship if we lose our audience. I don't want that to happen."

"And that completes the circle," Megan said.

"The Domonkos project might lose us viewers, so we could focus more on SOCs, but SOCs could kill us too, so developing leads where we know what monsters to expect is the smart move. Hence the Domonkos project."

"Quitting the CDM would give us time to do both, but I can't afford a risk like that yet."

"Me neither." Megan watched the road for a few quiet minutes.

"This secret CDM target you have, I know you can't tell me about it, but are you making progress?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"Does that worry you?"

"This would be easier if I could just tell you the story," I grumbled.

"I have no insight into anything beyond the glimmer of a possible hope. That's not going to change any time soon, I don't think."

"So quitting the CDM would be on the table for you?"

"If there's enough money for bills on that table too, yes." Megan laughed.

"Fair."

"We could see Domonkos on Saturdays and then try a SOC on Sundays. I don't know how long I'd have the energy for that, though."

"Yeah. Even one gate cull during the week would wreck that routine pretty quickly. And we agree that taking fewer culls isn't an option, correct? We need to level."

"Definitely correct." After a stretch of quiet, I asked, "Are you excited to graduate from being an intern?" Megan's internship officially ended on Monday, and I was only one month behind her.

"I'm excited to be done, but I kind of feel like the CDM is stalling."

"How so?"

"Saito and Leminson had more nuanced discussions about career direction with higher-ups before placement. I was told I'd move up to enforcer in the Pittsburgh office. That's it. I get the sense they are delaying real decisions until all this shit with doomers settles down."

"Were you hoping for something different?" She shrugged.

"I don't know. I'm happy with enforcer, but I don't like being a total afterthought when I've seen other interns get it better."

"That's fair," I conceded. Megan's phone buzzed. She studied her screen for a few moments.

"Can I plug my phone in?" she asked.

"We should probably listen to this."

"Go for it." An ad for a workplace injury attorney played before the video began–audio only for me since I was driving, but Megan could watch.

"Three gates held by the Mormon Church were hit by crawlers this evening," a woman's voice said.

"There were no survivors. The attackers left an envelope at each site with the same message inside: 'We solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Politicizing dungeon gates puts our families and our homes at risk. The occupation of dungeon gates must stop.'"

The woman continued, saying, "State governments across the country are on high alert for copycat attacks at occupied dungeon gates and church communities that have expressed support for occupations. In light of the scale of the problem, the National Guard is being mobilized to every major city.

"A CDM spokesperson says that the agency's stance hasn't changed. Until occupiers interact with the gate directly, the matter is out of their jurisdiction. The area around a gate doesn't become the purview of the CDM until a gate has been cleared according to harvester safety standards and workers arrive on site to begin that harvest.

"The exception is that if a gate comes within four hours of surging. At that point, the CDM is authorized to close a dungeon gate 'by any means necessary,' but no occupation has lasted long enough to test the CDM's response to such a scenario, and they will not comment on what the response would be.

"The House has convened an emergency session to address this crisis, but no details have been released as to potential solutions. This all comes on the heels of the frost giant crisis, which still has government leaders calling for more robust management of the wilds."

"Good lord," Megan whispered to herself.

"A job with the CDM is supposed to be boring as hell. That's what everyone said to me, at least."

"I heard the same."

"I don't see how anyone but the crawlers 'win' in this case, but the CDM is going to bury everyone in fees and policies if that's how this goes. How is this only a problem in the US and not in Europe?" The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"They're way less religious," I said, "and they started taxing churches decades ago. I read a few Redditors saying that's what ends this. The government removes the tax-exempt status and offers a set amount of gate credits to churches for 'free.'""Would that work?" I laughed.

"I think the churches would completely lose their shit if they caught even a whiff of a tax change."

"Yeah. That sounds right to me. This thing is just going to get uglier, and it will stay ugly for a long time."

"Probably." Megan and I got back late Saturday night, and it felt like I had just lain down on the couch to sleep when my phone buzzed.

"A D gate needs cullers by 4 a. m. Are you available?"

"Yes," I grunted.

"Thank you for your service. I am texting you the address now." When I searched directions for the GPS, my eyes squinting to see through the brightness of the screen, I had to reread the trip estimate twice. Then I made sure I searched the right address. This D gate was an hour and a half away, which assumed that all of the roads and bridges the GPS wanted me to take were still, in fact, passable. That far out from the city, a single detour could turn into the long way around all too easily.

Another hour and a half in the car. Ugh. I had just driven to Uniontown and back. Another three hours in the car that early in the morning? More and more I understood why the CDM played these little mind games with voluntary dungeon culls. If I was allowed to see the drive distance before agreeing to the run, I would have said no. Just like I would say no to a Roach Run if I knew that's what it was ahead of time. This D gate was on the other side of a small state college town named Indiana.

The school shuttered a long time ago, and most of the town was deserted, but a small contingent of residents still hung on. Not that you could tell that was the case at 3 a. m. No streetlights, no porch lights, only the occasional eye-shines of opossums, raccoons, and rats. Indiana looked just as abandoned as any place Sean and I had inspected. Driving down another dirt road, this one worryingly narrow, I pulled in behind a cluster of cars at the edge of a small stream called "Two Lick Creek."

The remains of a two-lane concrete bridge were behind the gate, and its size didn't seem right, like it was overkill for going over a body of water that small. When I got out of my car, I heard one of the crawlers say that this used to be a reservoir. The dam was destroyed a while back, so at one point, the scale of the bridge did, in fact, make sense. The gate itself was at the very edge of the stream. It looked like a roughly assembled wooden palisade and reminded me of a colonial reenactment.

A familiar voice called, "If it isn't Intern Enforcer Gray!" Enforcer McDouglas sat on the hood of his CDM SUV dressed more like a construction worker than a crawler. I couldn't see it, but I assumed he had an obnoxiously bright polo shirt under his rugged canvas jacket. A pair of pants made from the same material and a pair of heavy-duty steel-toed boots completed the ensemble. A sword and shield leaned against the bumper at his feet, but I didn't see any other armor or gear around that seemed to be his.

Three other crawlers in standard CDM martial class gear stood nearby. A more curious detail caught my attention: "Have you been tanning?" I asked. He laughed.

"Spent a little too much time working outside. Didn't pay enough attention and got a wicked sunburn. This lovely baked hue is the result."

"I thought you might be on vacation since you haven't been in the office."

"I wish. No, I've been shackled to the grindstone this whole time."

"I can imagine," I said. And I could. Anything CDM-related had become an increasingly worse shit show.

"Are you joining the run or leading it?" He grinned.

"You get to call me captain today. We're waiting for one more, by the way, so you have time to get geared up." I nodded and did just that. At this point, I could get into or out of my full crawl kit in just a few minutes. The various buckles and straps and cinches were second nature.

"Whoa," one of the other cullers said. He was a burly man and carried a mace.

"The intern is packing heat." McDouglas wrinkled his face.

"He sure is. May I see that?" I handed my lesser ironwood bow to McDouglas. He ran his fingers along the frame and held it up to assess the curve. He whistled and offered it back to me.

"What truck did this fall off of?" My laugh came out more nervous than I would have liked.

"I got lucky and found a deal."

"Lucky isn't a strong enough word for it," he said.

"I've never seen an intern get their hands on something this nice. Next time you spot a deal like that, you call me, okay?" McDouglas and the other crawlers chuckled. A phone dinged. McDouglas checked his.

"The guard can't make it after all. We'll be fine to run this without him. Mount up, everyone." The other crawlers looked nervously between one another. If McDouglas noticed their concern, he didn't comment or act on it.

"Don't you need to put on your armor, sir?" the same burly man from before asked.

"Don't worry about me, barbarian. Worrying about yourself should keep you busy enough." A little embarrassed, the man nodded. In truth, I think all of us had the same question, but the barbarian was the only one brave enough to ask. Maybe McDouglas was leveled enough that a D gate was that trivial in his mind? He could also be crazy. I had seen a few hints of that too in our time together, but nothing that would make me think he would run a gate without real armor.

Unfortunately, the gate wasn't all that challenging, so I didn't get a real look at what McDouglas was capable of. A lower D-ranked vermin gate, the frontline didn't stay very busy. With my dex, the power of my build really shone. Dual Nocking was a waste, but Piercing Shot put in work. I could snipe most of the giant rats crawling down the tunnels at us, leaving a manageable few for the others to smash and stab. McDouglas didn't really participate. He let the other volunteers manage the bulk of the kills.

The boss of this particular gate was a semi-rare variant: the corpse of a fat den mother rat sat in the middle of the room. When we entered, a botfly the size of a motorcycle burst from the body, followed by a handful of smaller botflies and dozens of crawling larvae. My dex build was a good fit for this encounter as well, and two of the other volunteers had encountered this variant before. Between their experience, my speed, and McDouglas' coaching from the back, we managed the boss fight just fine.

Surprisingly–from my perspective, at least–the larvae were the trickiest enemies of the bunch. They moved with the swiftness of normal-sized rats, and the botflies distracted us enough that we didn't notice the larvae climbing the ceiling of the boss room until they started falling on us. If the botflies had been more of a challenge, that surprise could have been deadly, but for us, it was a gross way to get startled. On our way out of the gate, McDouglas drifted to the back to speak with me.

"Looks like you've been training," he said.

"Yeah. As much as I can."

"Heard you drew a hobgoblin variant on a D gate a little while ago." I nodded.

"From the notes, I didn't agree with the call to push your group to the boss fight. I get why the captain made that choice, but it was pretty damn risky."

"It wasn't the easiest crawl I've had," I joked.

"Sounded like you handled yourself. Good work."

"Thank you."

"Well, have a good drive back," McDouglas said, clapping me on the back.

"See you tomorrow." The XP for that vermin gate sucked, by the way: XP Progress: 626/3200 251 XP wasn't nothing, but with the rate the CDM assigned D-ranked gates, it would be another two and a half months at best before I got to level 7.