Chương 67: CDM 2, Chapter 3: Tutorial

When Enforcer Chapman said that pilots from the Air Force would train us on the new drones, I pictured a flight simulator. In actuality, the controls were mostly the same as the drones we used in the field already. This system gave us access to more specific telemetry data as well as readouts for things like humidity and wind speed. Other than the telemetry readout, I likely wouldn't need the others, as the drone AI was supposed to automatically read and assess more complicated factors.

The features I would use, however, were the multiple camera modes. Our typical field drones had rudimentary night vision that was good enough for what it was, so seeing a better version of that wasn't a surprise. These drones added thermal vision, however, which was cool to play with but not very complicated otherwise. The day after that, we spent a full eight hours in trainings on privacy and data security.

The nature of dungeon gates meant that our drones would often hover over residential areas for long periods of time. Most of the material boiled down to "don't be a creep," but the procedures we learned were detailed and strictly enforced. If we failed to follow them, the footage we captured might not be admissible in court. When dungeon gates appeared in residential areas, our drones were permitted to record any public street or sidewalk, but recording private property came with restrictions.

Other than a five-yard footprint immediately around the gate that was always fair game to record, the drone AI was supposed to black out everything else that wasn't considered public. We could reveal those areas with cause–like following a crawler passing into the obscured region–but we couldn't passively film everything that happened in a person's backyard.

I suspected a significant amount of my work would be correcting the AI's best guess of what was safe to record, like hours and hours of "select every picture with a stoplight" exercises. We wrapped the week up with knowledge and skills tests to prove we understood the project and the regulations surrounding it. We took a separate test to prove we could pilot the very expensive drones.

While I felt pretty good about all of the above, the pilot training we received didn't seem proportional to the value of the equipment. A day with an instructor for equipment that costs a few hundred thousand dollars? The CDM was putting far too much faith in the AI navigation system, in my opinion, at least. But I wasn't in charge, and my thoughts didn't matter.

The best I could do was follow the policies to the letter, be diligent and careful in my work, and hope that Chapman and the CDM as a whole recognized the effort. I didn't know what the path was to become an Unsung Hero, but I figured a promotion and another pay raise were good no matter what. I just had to put in the work. If I didn't get anywhere with the CDM, I still had hope that the Dungeon Divas YouTube channel could be successful.

"What are we going to do if our scheduling sucks?" Megan asked the night we ran away from the Chestnut Ridge goblins. She sat on her bed in our shared motel room with a television remote in one hand and a piece of pizza in the other. We should have been sleeping, but neither of us had come down from running through the woods to escape a horde of monsters.

"I don't see what we can do other than hope for the best," I replied.

"Would have been a lot easier if we were partnered." As interns, Megan and I were often partnered for fieldwork. For RAID, she was paired with Enforcer de Saint, a shortening of her name that de Saint suggested herself, and I was paired with Enforcer Cortez. Our schedules would change each week, but we were warned to expect night shifts as well as weekend shifts.

Given the size of the RAID team, Megan and I weren't guaranteed to have the same days off, which presented a serious problem for shooting Dungeon Divas content. Megan sighed.

"I know you don't like talking about it, but we might have to consider leaving the CDM a lot earlier than we expected. If we get back to the cave tomorrow and find that the poison worked, I bet we get another big uptick in subscribers."

"The money-" Megan held up her hands.

"I know. I know. The money is too inconsistent. I just doubt there will ever be a 'perfect' time to make that jump. No matter what, it's going to be a risk."

"Sorry, I'm a wuss."

"I get it, Dor." She didn't look over at me. Instead, she continued flipping channels. She had looked so long for something to watch that a whole new round of shows was starting, so she began the search all over again.

"If I really screwed up," Megan continued, "I know I could always move back with my parents. I would hate that so, so much, but I have that safety net. You don't, and that must be hard."

"I don't want to hold you back."

"You're not," she replied, her voice muffled by a mouthful of dough and cheese.

"I need you more than you need me. Dungeon Divas can't exist without you." I laughed.

"I was thinking the same thing but the other way around. All the editing you do? Managing the channel? I couldn't do any of that."

"So we're a proper team then."

"I like the sound of that." After a long pause, Megan asked, "What do you think happened to Jonathan? I feel so bad for Beth. I don't know that I'd be able to handle someone I love going missing."

"I'm worried about her." Megan glanced over at me, narrowing her eyes. She was smart enough to pick up on me dodging such a simple question. Thankfully, she didn't press that line of inquiry directly. She turned back to the television.

"What are the chances you think he'll turn up?"

"Zero."

"You sound certain."

"Guess I am."

"Anything we can do for her?"

"I don't know what to do in a situation like this," I admitted.

"I'm doing my best to be supportive and to be there for her, but it feels like I'm not doing enough."

"That means more than you realize," Megan assured me.

"She knows you're in her corner. We all are, really, but you know what I mean."

"Yeah." Megan looked at her phone.

"It's already 3 a. m.," she groaned.

"The adrenaline from that sprint is still buzzing through my veins."

"Same."

"Think the poison worked?"

"I hope so. Collecting and handling all that arsenic was pretty damn scary, and that was a few hundred bucks of wine and food we ruined. I know all of that camping gear was thrift store quality, but that stuff is probably ruined too. I'd hate for that to be all for nothing."

"It will work."

"We'll see." Stepping carefully, we walked from the old reservoir and then along the stream until we found our crossing point. All of the cheap lights we left in the woods were gone, which was a good sign. If the goblins looted that junk, then they almost certainly took the food and wine from our camp. Finding our way back to that camp wasn't difficult. The trail Megan and I left was full of deep prints and gouges where we slid on leaves and mud during our escape.

Then a small army of goblin prints came in behind our tracks to tear the route up even more. We didn't rush. Instead, we adopted a plodding pace where we scanned and rescanned our surroundings while diligently watching for traps in the trail. That chill fall morning, the forest was quiet. No goblins moved in the brush, plotting an ambush. No tripwires or other such traps blocked our path. As we hoped, our campsite had been picked clean.

The tent, our sleeping bags, our pan, our lamp, our boxes of wine, and our cooler full of meat were all gone. The number of tracks around the camp significantly outnumbered the group that chased us through the woods.

"Is it weird that I think they look excited?" Megan whispered, inspecting the chaos orbiting the white ash of our dead fire.

"It is a lot of activity." Next, we crept to the treeline. A few pieces of our cave-front bonfire still smoldered, but the debris had been shoved aside to clear the entrance. We watched from cover for fifteen minutes. This time yesterday, a few goblins were already going about their work for the day. Presently, the area around the caves was deserted. The only visible movement was the wisps of smoke rising from blackened boards. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author.

Report any sightings. Megan deployed our follower drone. While I kept watch, she approached the entrance from the side so that nothing inside could look out and spot her. She stopped alongside the cave mouth, crouched, and listened. When she signaled that the nest was silent, I followed her example but came from the opposite direction. I too stopped to listen for activity. I didn't hear anything either. Megan entered first with her sword drawn and shield up, and I followed four paces behind with my bow.

I had a shortsword on my back as well, but we decided that the size of the caves warranted having a ranged weapon ready. There was a chance that we'd get jumped in a tight space where the bow was mostly useless, but the maps said the caves were quite large in places. Furthermore, we knew that these goblins were capable of making bows. If they mounted a ranged offensive, it would be up to me to respond.

I ducked under the low entrance and followed Megan down a passage that narrowed to the width of my shoulders for several steps before opening into a chamber that looked like something out of a sci-fi film. Countless stalactites hung from the ceiling, narrow like icicles, and here and there stalagmites rose like conical towers from the ground. I had never been in a place like this before. It felt strange and alien to me, like my biology wasn't compatible with the world I now found myself in.

We lingered at the entrance before traveling deeper. According to Domonkos' files, bats nested here for the winter. Guano supposedly smelled like ammonia, but it was hard to separate that aroma from the powerful punch of goblin feces. Visually, though, it was easy to distinguish bat shit from goblin. Guano looked like someone spilled a bag of black cheetos across the ground. Goblin poop looked like your evil little cousin left a present in your underwear drawer.

The goblins didn't seem to mind the guano, and that was good for us because it made their trail through the caves even easier to follow. Anywhere the bat shit was smashed flat, goblins had been. Simple as that. We scanned the chamber with our headlamps. A pile of firewood taller than me was tossed in one corner.

Scraps of lumber and the occasional beer or soup can were scattered here and there in such a way that I wasn't sure what was left by goblins and what had been left by humans who visited these caves before us. I clicked my tongue to alert Megan when I spotted a goblin near the ceiling. It had slid into a narrow recess looking down on the chamber. I could see a green hand and part of a bow, but it didn't move. Megan clicked back and pointed to another goblin archer on the other side of the cave.

Its hiding spot wasn't as elevated as the first's, but it still had a good view of the space and was easy to miss with only a headlamp to search. It didn't move either. In fact, it looked like it lay face-first in its own vomit. Covering Megan with my bow, I kept watch as she approached the lower of the two goblins. She pushed its head with the flat of her sword a few times. It didn't react. Holy crap. Did this plan actually work?

She stabbed it in the neck to be sure it was dead and then investigated the other archer. Climbing up to that one was a little tricky. When she withdrew her stab, its body bounced down the rocky cave side to the floor. Ahead, deeper into the caves, we spotted more dead goblins slumped in vomit and diarrhea, both telltale signs of arsenic poisoning. Venturing toward them, even with reasonable certainty that they were dead, was far scarier than any dungeon gate I had ever run.

The first chamber alone had six smaller passages breaking away from it, adding even more shadowy pockets where goblins could lie in wait. Full-clearing this place was worse than a nightmare. Even if we had a party of six or eight, I'd be nervous as hell about missing something and getting a goblin arrow in the back for my mistake. Before we went any farther, I used a can of spray paint to mark the route with an arrow.

Since we knew goblins were smart enough to mess with trail markers, this was blacklight paint, making it completely invisible. We would switch to blacklights when we were ready to leave. I tried to practice Domonkos' trail-memorization method, logging descriptive landmarks and movements as we progressed, but it was so much to keep in mind when traps and ambushes were also a worry. I knew I needed more practice, but I feared no amount of practice would make underground navigation reliable for me.

Hugging the left wall, the space narrowed again. We went straight through two intersections of passages before coming to a section that had been walled off and blocked with a cobbled-together wooden gate. If the goblins were alive, they had great defensible positions all around this area. They could easily attack en masse from above, but we saw only goblin corpses, and the gate hung open. Megan diligently stabbed every goblin corpse to confirm they were as dead as they looked.

The chamber beyond the gate was wider than it was deep. Here, the stalactites were few but thick, and the cave floor was covered with makeshift goblin beds. Most were simple piles of leaves, but a few looked like old salvaged tarps and clothing were mixed in. Our cooler of meat was tipped over in the middle of the fray, and empty wine boxes were scattered all around. I counted forty-three dead goblins. When Megan looked back at me, I wished I could see her face beneath her helmet.

I suspected her grin was as big as mine. Our silly plan worked. Then she raised her hand. I heard it too. Two hissing voices seemed to argue, the noise echoing out of a passage at the back left of this chamber. From my memory of the map, I knew an even larger chamber was beyond, but it was out of sight. The one access path split into a Y, meaning we could choose which side of the room we entered from. We picked the right-hand passage and killed our headlamps. A small orange glow flickered out of the chamber ahead.

The grunted back-and-forth arguing continued as we slowly crept forward. Since Megan was in the lead, she put eyes on this third chamber before I did. When she pulled her head back, she gestured in the dim light. Two goblins. No, two goblin shamans. I pantomimed my reply, asking if she saw anything else around the chamber. She shook her head. With a finger swoop, she indicated that she would backtrack and enter from the other passage. I understood the intent.

She flashed ten fingers three times over, meaning she wanted thirty seconds, so I hunkered down and started to count Mississippis. I used that time to get a look at the chamber. Goblin corpses were scattered about like the aftermath of a drunken orgy, all covered in their own filth. The two shamans stood near the back wall but were still relatively exposed. They wore necklaces and skirts of bones and seemed very upset by the death all around them.

At thirty-four Mississippi, I pulled two road flares from my bandolier, sparked them on the wall, and threw them into the room. The shamans scattered. I shot two arrows at one and missed both times. My nerves had gotten to me. My breathing was as shaky as my hands. Talef3ther, my online archery instructor, told me the only way to fix that problem was to get used to the pressure of facing a serious threat. Two goblin shamans rattled me pretty well, it seemed.

Fire splashed around me as the shamans peppered my position with spells. I pressed myself against the wall, willing myself to get flatter than humanly possible.

"Not yet!" I yelled, assuming Megan could hear me. I popped out and used Dual Nocking to launch another two arrows at the nearest shaman. It had taken cover behind a stalagmite and ducked away as soon as it spotted me. The other shaman whipped more fireballs in my direction.

"Okay!" I shouted as I slipped back behind cover, but I only did that for a moment. I wasted a few arrows blindly firing into the chamber, fearing that giving the goblins time to aim their attacks would be the end of me. As soon as I heard the scraping of Megan's feet dashing into the fray, I followed suit and burst into the room. I fired three arrows, one after the other, as I crossed the chamber to a decent bit of cover behind some rocks. The shamans shrieked.

The sound of rocks bouncing off a shield followed immediately after. That meant the goblins targeted Megan with their spells now. I loosed a quick arrow and winged one of the shamans. It turned its angry eyes in my direction and immediately paid for the mistake. Megan put a sword through its back. A basketball-sized orb of flame crashed into Megan. She barely got her shield up in time, and the blast knocked her off her feet.

I couldn't stay behind cover now, not when Megan was exposed, so I kept firing, all the while advancing on the remaining shaman. I dove to the side to escape another massive fireball. The flicker of a flare arced across the chamber toward the shaman. I figured that was Megan trying to draw attention, so I committed to advancing until I found an angle. Thwack. Thwack. Two arrows buried themselves in the shaman's chest. With blood in its mouth, the shaman grinned at me.

Lightning arced between its hands, and I felt every hair on my body stand on end as electricity filled the air. Then a sword burst through its stomach. I put another arrow in its head just to be sure it was dead. This was all the deeper we were willing to go on our own, so we took our time searching the room while we stabbed a few dozen dead goblins. Megan waved me over when she found something. Slumped in the corner was what I thought was a hobgoblin at first.

It was seven feet tall, green, roped with muscle, and covered in ritual scarification. It wore animal hides like armor and had a 2x4 in its hand. One end had been sanded down to a handle shape, and the other end was filled with bent nails. He sat on both of the sleeping bags, having claimed them for himself, apparently. They were too gross now to bother recovering. I swallowed. That was a goddamn goblin champion.

Even though Megan had stabbed it twice to be sure it was dead, I still found myself hesitating to get too close. If that bastard were alive, we would have been in serious trouble. Judging from her body language, Megan was similarly disturbed. Among the dead were four berserkers, but the rest were grunts. When we examined the shamans more closely, we found that one had three human skulls on its necklace. The rest looked like animal bones, but I didn't know enough to confidently identify them.

More goblins might be deeper, as we had explored only a small portion of the overall cave system, but this was enough evidence for us to say our job was done. In total, we killed one hundred twenty-three goblins. How much XP did that garner us? I didn't know if the system gave us credit for killing goblins with poison, but from the grunts we picked off before the poison and the shamans we killed after, I got a whopping 4 XP.

I reviewed my system profile: Dorion Carmino Class: Archer Level: 6 XP Progress: 669/3200 Str: 7 Dex: 12 Con: 7 Int: 5 Cha: 3 Abilities: Piercing Shot Dual Nocking Traits: Ranged Accuracy Improved Reload Sharpen Momentum Spells: (none) Wow. Level 7 would take years if surface grinding was my only option. I couldn't wait to get called in to close another gate for the CDM so I could make actual progress.