Chương 61: Liability

Beth, Megan, Nathan, and I sat down to watch a LootLootLouis stream. We all had bowls of chicken alfredo in our laps. As Nathan settled, he said, "Haven't seen Jonny boy coming around lately. He still in the mix, or did that not work out?" Nathan didn't see my increasingly frantic headshakes and waves. Beth froze and paled slightly. She did that when she thought of Jonathan unexpectedly. If she was lucky, she would get a few hours in a row where she didn't remember that her boyfriend was murdered.

Nathan, through no fault of his own, shattered one of those blissful stretches of time. I cut in.

"He's missing," I said.

"Dude, what?" Nathan replied, lowering his fork back to his bowl with noodles and sauce still on it.

"Like 'missing person' missing?"

"Yeah. He's gone. That's as much as we know, though." Nathan finally caught the sharp edge of my stare.

"I'm sorry, Beth."

"It's okay," she said.

"You didn't know."

"Well, if there's anything we can do, let us know," Megan offered.

"Thank you." My phone buzzed.

"wtf bro why didn't you warn me""We were asked not to talk about it."

"like by the cops?"

"Yes. I wouldn't hide anything from you and Megan otherwise. I'm sorry that we did. There will be more of that because of my job probably, so sorry in advance there too."

"no i get it. is she okay?"

"Not really. He's likely not going to be found either."

"for real? how do you know?"

"Can't."

"oh ok. well, lmk if she needs anything. poor girl can't catch a fucking break" A second later, Nathan added:"how about say 'saucy' when it's something you aren't allowed to share" I looked at the bowl of alfredo in my lap.

"Did you pick the first thing you saw for that codeword?"

"for sure""Okay. Agreed."

"Frank's been good," Beth was saying when I returned my attention to the room instead of my phone.

"He's been having me do nothing but make bowstrings for the last two weeks."

"I figured you'd just buy the string," Megan said. Beth shook her head.

"You can, but Frank doesn't. He wants me to learn a few styles of strings and to learn what strings are good for what bows. String has to match the shape and draw weight perfectly. I've been practicing the Flemish twist, by the way."

"Is that a technique or a string type?" Megan asked.

"It's a style of string you make for a lot of bows." Megan thought for a moment.

"You know, I wonder if we could get some cheap E gates and get you to level 2. I bet adding a bow proficiency to your traits would help you a lot. I know we've joked about that before, but I'm being serious here."

"That's okay. I'm not worried about it." Beth wasn't worried about it because it had already happened. Crashing with Jonathan got her to level 3. Megan still believed Beth was level 1. Shrugging, Megan said, "If you change your mind, let me know."

"Thank you," Beth replied.

"Oh, I've got a bunch more OT coming up," Nathan said after a long pause.

"Just to warn everybody."

"That's good, right?" I asked.

"Good for me but bad for the airport. We got the wrong version of the blueprints somehow, and so did the carpenters, electricians, and drywallers. We built a full fucking wall and ran wiring and conduit through it, and it's not supposed to exist."

"You're kidding," Megan said. Nathan chuckled.

"When I first saw it framed out, I was like, 'this is a weird place for a wall,' but the fuck do I know about building airports? Now we're tearing it all out and rebuilding it the way it's supposed to be."

"That's nuts," I added.

"Who ends up taking the hit for something like that?" Shrugging, he answered, "Either the foreman in charge of that section or the person who gives him blueprints. I don't know that I'll hear what ends up going down there, though."

"Does that happen a lot?" Beth asked.

"In smaller forms. Like, the electricians might misread the blueprints, but the framing is fine. Shit happens, but usually it's just one team who screwed up, and it gets caught before the next team starts."

"Makes sense."

"You working over the weekend makes me feel better about playing in the woods all day Saturday," Megan said through a mouthful of food.

"Speak to any more taxidermists recently?" Nathan asked. I turned the volume up to avoid talking about acquiring stuffed pets again.

"Fap, this is SebastionTheLarge and Smash," Larry said, gesturing to the man and woman getting out of a banged-up two-door. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Sebastian said he was a fighter, and Smash said she was a barbarian. She was a little taller than he was, but just a little, and I had the distinct impression they were a couple. This was my fourth crash. We had yet to come close to intersecting with crawlers.

The one occasion where I got the push notification that signaled the gate had been purchased, the team that bought it didn't get to it for another two days. Running into the Mill Rats, let alone Martin Kielar specifically, was going to be one in a million at this rate. Enforcer McDouglas assured me that was a problem he had known from the start. He said, "Something's in the works," but didn't say what or when the works would be ready.

In the meantime, the CDM was going through the Discord logs for the private crashing channels Nico now had access to. My role in this acquisition was credited to a confidential informant, so Enforcer Chapman and Investigator Dempson didn't know I was specifically involved. While a few years of chat history wouldn't get us directly to Kielar, McDouglas believed we could find new leads on crashers who had gone missing.

Investigating those might connect the CKers to the victims with some magical piece of evidence capable of a conviction. One of those CKers might be a Mill Rat, but there was no way to know without doing the diligence. And I wasn't allowed to help with the diligence or even see the chat logs. Because I was an intern, I didn't have the clearance to see the evidence that I acquired. My job was to keep crashing every chance I got.

Which put me in a D-ranked squid gate with Larry, SebastianTheLarge, and Smash for that fourth run. With the CDM, they preferred a six-person party for this type of dungeon, but we were crashers. Big parties were hard to coordinate and tended to be slower overall in every aspect of the crash, not just inside the dungeon. The party size was the first red flag. The second red flag was how they handled the slimes.

The CDM method of knocking on each door to lure the slimes inside out into the hallway was too slow, so instead, we ran right by.

"We'll get them on the way back," Larry said, but that meant a slick would be in our way when we needed to go back. Apologies, a slick is to slimes as a herd is to horses or a murder is to crows. Anyway, the point is I didn't like the idea of having monsters in our escape route. This wasn't their first squid run, so this had worked for them before, I told myself. If they lived then, we can live through this. We handled the first rush of inkers and beakers okay.

On several occasions, my whole body puckered as someone's sword would pass alarmingly close to an ally. In some parties, that may have been a sign of exceptional teamwork, but here it was by chance alone that Smash didn't sever one of Sebastian's carotids. Yet another moment where I was happy to be an archer. The frequency with which I had those realizations made me wonder whether my class primed me to be more passionate about archery and to find reasons why I liked it better.

If that's how classes worked, Saito wouldn't have been as miserable about being a monk, so maybe the system priming theory was a stretch. I was even more thankful to be an archer when inkers nailed Sebastian and Smash at the same time. The blinding ink was a direct hit for both of them. Their safety glasses got the worst of it, which meant their eyesight was fine. That brief second of blindness, however, enabled a beaker to bite down on Sebastian's calf and a slime to start climbing Smash's leg.

I didn't see the slime either, so I was culpable here too. I had learned that lesson once already, and I didn't do my part to support my frontline with good calls. McDouglas insisted the footage I recorded told a different story–that the slime was low and obscured by Smash and two inkers. It was a physical impossibility for me to know a slime was in that mess.

Sebastian threw off his glasses to help Smash with the slime rapidly approaching her face, at which point it would drive itself through her nose and mouth to fill her lungs, drowning her. In Sebastian's haste, his shield backhanded Larry. The surprise jostle let a beaker slip through and latch onto the back of Larry's knee. In a blink, I became the only unhindered, uninjured member of the party. As soon as Sebastian freed Smash, they would both be back in the fight–I hoped–so I just needed to buy the party time.

I sniped the beaker on Larry's leg, a decision I was surprised to see myself make given the risks, and then focused on inkers and slimes, using Piercing Shot and Dual Nocking as often as possible to take down multiple squids at once. I had mixed results with the slimes. Hitting their small cores from a distance as they sped along was difficult. We survived that wave. Even I was bleeding by that point. Two beakers got close enough to me to bite.

One chomped on my thigh, and the other dropped from the ceiling to bite down on my shoulder. Compared to the frontline, however, I was in fantastic condition. Larry had trouble putting weight on his injured leg. One of his eyes swelled shut from an inker bashing him so hard his helmet flew off. And he had several leaky points of red in other places that I hoped were as superficial as they looked. Sebastian and Smash were bit up.

Smash lost her helmet too, having to abandon it to keep from being drowned by a slime, and she had twisted her shoulder. Sebastian didn't have any mobility injuries that I could see, but he was bleeding a lot, so that wasn't great. More squids were coming. I helped Larry hobble-hop toward the exit while Sebastian and Smash led the way. In the final stretch of dungeon, with the gate in sight, we ran into the slick we had left for later.

Sebastian and Smash charged through, high-stepping frantically to avoid stepping in a slime. Sebastian didn't pull it off, however, and fell. When the slick swarmed him, Smash activated her Berserk ability and tore through the slimes with her bare hands to protect Sebastian. Very few of those slimes actually died before going airborne, so the one that smacked Larry in the face immediately worked to drown him. To her credit, Smash used her Berserk to protect me while I dragged Larry to the exit.

I would have preferred she not throw monsters around willy-nilly, but at least she helped me. The slime in Larry's lungs was a problem, but the remaining slick was more urgent, so getting out took priority. Larry and I tumbled out of the gate a few seconds after Sebastian and Smash. They were already running across the railroad tracks and into the woods. Our cars were parked in that direction. Meanwhile, Larry was dying.

"Memphis! Fucking Memphis! Shit, shit, shit." Larry collapsed, unconscious. I rolled him onto his back and used two hands to apply the Heimlich. When I learned this in college, I always found it way harder than the behind-the-back version used for victims who were still awake and aware. You straddled the victim, linked one hand over the other, and shoved your palm forward and under their sternum.

"Memphis! Hurry up, damn it!" A little bit of green slime spurted from Larry's lips. I grabbed for it, and it separated from the whole, leaving goop in my hand while the slime attempted to retreat down his throat again. Push. Push. Push. A little more slime. I snatched that too, but Larry was still drowning. I heard footsteps. McDouglas and two investigators appeared.

"Slime in his lungs," I said.

"He needs a hospital," McDouglas said. He reached down and effortlessly pulled Larry into a fireman's carry.

"We got him," McDouglas told me.

"Get to your car and get out of here." Then he ran into the woods with the investigators closely behind. I did as I was told, but I had to wait for my hands to stop shaking to drive away. An hour later, McDouglas sent me an update: Larry would live, but his lungs would need a while to heal. He had other injuries too, but they wouldn't know how bad they were until all the tests and scans wrapped up. None of those were life-threatening, though. My orders were to go to sleep and to take the next day off.

I wasn't sure how likely sleeping was, but a day off sounded great. I got in a little after 3 a. m., showered, and claimed my usual spot on the couch. When sleep didn't come, I turned on a stream with the volume low and the lights off. Beth came out of my room not long after that.

"Did I wake you?" I asked. She shook her head.

"I can't sleep. Can I sit with you?"

"Of course." As she sat, she leaned her head onto my shoulder. When she settled in a comfortable little ball, her arms hugging her shins, she whispered, "Everything is going to be okay." I wanted to argue that it wouldn't, but I opted to keep my mouth shut instead. Beth fell asleep a few minutes later.