Chương 76: CDM 2, Chapter 12: Customer Complaint

Enforcer Cortez and I were on our way to inspect a harvest site in the sticks.

"I've never seen legislation move so fast," I mused. As you might have expected, the Baker Bill was a frequent topic for anyone in the CDM. Whenever someone had a new thought to share, the conversations started right back up again. Cortez sucked soda through a straw before replying.

"I'm not."

"There's a big list of stuff that could use government intervention, and all we do is argue about it. Why isn't something like homelessness treated with the same urgency?"

"Is that a serious question?"

"Yes."

"This Enforcer I trained under would say we are 'in the business of apocalypse prevention,'" Cortez answered.

"The guy pooping behind the dumpster isn't going to end the world. Angry crawlers could, so the gears turn faster. I mean, everyone talks about crawlers killing people, but man, imagine if they went on strike."

"I never thought about crawlers striking."

"Now that you are, it's scary shit, right?" Chuckling nervously, I said, "Yeah. It's not like the gates are all on the same schedule. No matter when the strike started, you'd be hours away from at least one dungeon surge." Cortez nodded.

"Yep. An apocalypse, in other words. They had to squash the crasher and doomer BS before crawlers got too pissed."

"They did move quick on helping New Eden." My partner stared at me for a second and then belly-laughed.

"Man, you're serious, aren't you?"

"What?"

"The government orchestrated every step of New Eden. Rick Young magically has a vision from God right when doomers need dealt with? It's so obvious that he's a plant."

"That's elaborate."

"It's the most obvious thing in the world." I shook my head.

"I'm not saying I believe Rick Young spoke to God, but he wouldn't be the first to cash in on a religious panic. That doesn't mean the CIA put him up to it."

"You'll see," he said, frowning at his empty drink.

"It's our own government stealing our levels. We bust our asses to get gates to run, but they can't lose any revenue by giving free gates to doomers. They can for sure take them from us, though. It's all bullshit."

"We agree on that part." This C-ranked gate was on an old baseball field near a tiny forgotten town. Boxed in by woods on three sides and old houses on the last side, you could still see the shape of the diamond in the tall grass, but the number of trucks, trailers, and excavation equipment surrounding the gate nearly hid it. Like it was with most harvests, every available square inch was put to use. We had to park up the hill on a nearby gravel road and walk down.

"Wet cold is way different from dry cold," Cortez grumbled as we strolled into the harvest site.

"I can handle cold, but wet cold is just bullshit."

"I have bad news for you."

"I know, it gets worse. Every single person I meet in this town tells me that. No matter what we're talking about, they slip in 'if you think this is cold-' somehow." I laughed. And then I recognized a specific trailer. I knew coming in that the Mill Rats bought this gate, but I had visited several of their harvests without ever encountering a crawler. Seeing Martin Kielar on social media was more than I could handle some days. If that was bad, I didn't want to experience running into him in person.

Maybe he wasn't here, and the trailer hadn't been moved yet. Cortez and I split up to begin the inspection. My phone rang.

"Got a tip for you," Megan said.

"There's a row of barrels of something on the edge of the site, your 3 o'clock."

"Thank you."

"10-4." She hung up. If the barrels were empty, there was no citation. If they weren't, they might not meet the standards for "properly secured." No one was likely to spill one and disintegrate or anything like that, but secure also meant "unlikely to be stolen." If the contents were hazardous in any way, the harvesters had a duty to keep an eye on them. I nearly walked right into Brennan Kielar.

My head was down, looking at the drone images Megan sent me, so I was halfway through apologizing before I recognized him. His eyes were wide, and he took an extra step away from me. He was the one creating distance? I knew for a fact his level was higher than mine, but I suppose he didn't know anything about what level I was. Still, though. I hadn't seen or heard from Brennan since I ambushed him, slapping a picture of Jonathan on the bar right in the middle of his date.

Based on his reaction back then, I was certain he was one of the last people to see Jonathan alive.

"Crawler Kielar," I said, dipping my head.

"How are you?"

"Fine. I have to go."

"Work going well?" He stepped close.

"Listen, please leave me alone. I can't help you, and it's going to be legalized anyway."

"What's going to be legalized?" Brennan's eyes narrowed. He must have thought better of answering because he pushed by me.

"I said, 'leave me alone.'" The worst part of that exchange was the reality of the point. Why would he betray his family by confessing to something that ended up being perfectly legal? I had hoped an intense desire for self-preservation combined with a crisis of conscience would inspire him to come forward, but the Baker Bill changed that. If CKing was legal, I was counting on his conscience alone. For some reason, I knew without a doubt that conscience wasn't enough, and not just for Brennan Kielar.

For most anyone. Knowing something was wrong wasn't powerful enough on its own. As much as you wanted people to do the right thing simply because it was right, they didn't. That wasn't a conclusion I chose. I knew it already. Intuitively. Like it was too obvious to even consider. Whatever. I found the barrels Megan flagged. They were filled with flocculents, chemicals used to treat and recycle mining wastewater.

Spilling them would be bad for the environment, but they weren't hazardous the way something like sulfuric acid was. Furthermore, these containers were on stable pallets and bungied together. No citation. Megan called again.

"Thanks for the tip," I said.

"Flocculents."

"Damn. I thought I had something there."

"No worries." I found a few trailers missing wheel chocks. We were on a flat baseball field, so nothing was likely to roll away, but they were still required. Meanwhile, Cortez busted a forklift operator with an expired certification, cited a few tripping hazards, and wrote up warnings for corrosion on various chains. We went inside the gate to finish the other half of the inspection. Crawlers called this type of dungeon "the moon." The ceiling was high.

Gray sand and rocks spread in every direction, only a few of the thousands nearing human height. Most were waist-high at best. This space was massive, but permanent fog obscured the horizon–or the distant walls of the chamber in this case. Despite the nickname, this wasn't moonrock. This was all cinders and black sand. A few different types of monsters could appear in a moon dungeon. This one looked like earth elementals and lava elementals, based on the remains we saw scattered about.

Any encounter was a pain on the moon because you couldn't see very far and attacks came from all directions. There was no terrain to work with. You were always exposed. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Everywhere, miners were driving chisels into rocks, by hand for the smaller ones and with machines for the larger, pumping water around to keep dust down and to cool chisel tips.

Most of these rocks would have nothing of interest inside, but a rare few would be geodes of wet onyx, smooth black crystals with black fog that flowed and moved like everything inside was liquid. An even rarer few would have mana spheres. Whatever cataclysmic heat that cooked this terrain also melted and compressed mana crystals, shaping them into perfect balls. The largest ever found was about the size of a volleyball. Most were no bigger than a penny or a nickel, but they were incredibly valuable.

Whole power plants ran on mana crystals, but spheres were far denser than any crystals found in monsters. That density meant far more energy packed in a much smaller place, making spheres especially valuable. Mankind had yet to find a method for condensing mana crystals themselves, however. Pulling them out of a dungeon was the only way to get them. Because of the fog, the dungeon was marked with long strips of ribbon and thousands of flags.

They also designated equipment-only paths so the machinery coming in and out of the fog was less likely to run someone over. Our primary concern was confirming they didn't skimp on that practice, and we'd keep an eye out for other dumb violations like improper PPE or overloaded excavator buckets.

"I hate knowing I'll never get to run one of these," Cortez mused as we walked along a ribbon path.

"We'll probably pull a handful of C gates in our lives. I know if I got a C gate, it would end up being something generic like goblins. So boring." I didn't reply, but he knew I agreed. We all felt more or less the same on that topic. There were so many wild and weird dungeon gates, but the most interesting ones were C and above. I thought about the star dragon dungeon LootLootLouis ran a few months back surprisingly often. Usually when I pulled a Roach Run or an E-ranked vermin gate.

Wasn't there a saying about looking up at the stars from the mud? These stars were on YouTube, though. I would get closer to real stars than I would to an S-ranked dungeon like that. An explosion threw a shockwave breeze across the dungeon, unleashing a deafening thunderclap. We couldn't see it because of the fog, but we ran toward the noise. When we arrived thirty seconds later, dozens of workers were already on the scene, running in every direction, yelling back and forth to one another.

Around them, the impression of a crater the size of a merry-go-round smoked and sizzled. In a moon dungeon, an explosion like that could happen for very few reasons. The most common: someone broke a mana sphere. You have probably seen videos where someone is using a glass table and the whole surface suddenly crumbles. They don't hit it hard. The glass gets the wrong kind of pressure in exactly the right place, and poof. Your dining room was full of glass shards. In general, mana spheres were relatively durable.

They were always handled with care and packaged with an excessive amount of padding, but breaking one usually required deliberate incompetence or an enormous volume of bad luck.

"The new kid was learning the hammer," a man with a salt-and-pepper beard said. He sat on the ground with a blank expression, covered in black dust except where wounds leaked red, clumpy streaks down his arms and face, cuts from flying debris.

"He was doing it perfectly all day. By the book. I taught him myself." Ah. A miner smashed a sphere with a machine-powered chisel by mistake. He was three years younger than I was. That kept us on the scene for another two hours, setting Cortez and me way back for the day. We ended up finishing three hours later than usual, and then I had to stay and make sure everything was properly filed. I couldn't have Chapman catching me falling behind again. The day wasn't without its bright spots, though.

Beth sent me a steady stream of photos of her trip to Lake Erie. She and her friend Leah from Milly's went to an art museum that day and were planning to take a winter hike tomorrow. Booking a hotel room under her name was easy enough, so she would never know I paid for it with my own money, but she seemed skeptical of my I-got-the-hook-up story when I gave her my credit card. I fed her some bullshit about how they reimbursed $100 a day for food, so it was still free.

Yeah, that wasn't a very believable lie, but it was all I could come up with. The important thing was she accepted my credit card and went with it. It was so good to see her smile. I worked well past my shift and into Megan's overnight. When I was packing up, she asked, "De Saint just texted me. She got conned into a big drink order and needs hands. Want to come? Tea is on me." A late evening caffeine boost was a bad idea, but I was so tired that the bad idea won.

When we were outside of the CDM, standing at an intersection waiting for the light to change so we could cross, Megan took a deep inhale.

"What did Brennan mean when he said, 'it will be legalized soon?'" she asked.

"I wasn't trying to listen in. The drone mic picked it up."

"I don't know."

"Hey. It's me."

"No, that's not it. I can't talk about it."

"Oh. Ohhh." Megan looked up at the Do Not Cross light.

"You don't need to react to this at all. I'm not even going to look at your face. I respect the corner you're in. But… But I had a feeling something like that happened to Jonathan. No, I haven't said anything to anyone, and I'd never bother Beth with it." I didn't know what to say.

"You've done a good job keeping the secret," Megan added.

"I'm around you enough and know enough about your work to connect some dots, putting together the way you react to certain topics or moments. It took a while, up until today, really. Nathan doesn't even know. And he won't hear it from me, by the way."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're not alone, Dor. No matter how much you or the universe tries to convince you that you are." The sign changed, and Megan started across the street. By the time I caught up, her demeanor had changed. Bubbling, she insisted I try a new tea offering grown only in Tanganyika and acted as if the previous conversation had never happened. I was fortunate to have her as a friend.

"Thank you," de Saint said, passing me one of the cardboard cupholders.

"That's the last time I make a general office offer to pick up tea. We're still waiting for a few more."

"More?" I asked. I already counted 11 cups.

"Yeah. Lesson learned. Hey, uhh… Osheski said you might have ideas for my build."

"I've been doing some reading, but I'm not an expert."

"I'd still like to hear them." Behind de Saint, Megan grinned triumphantly. I set the drinks down since we were waiting anyway. A few taps later, I added, "Okay. I sent you four options."

"You had these prepared?"

"More like I'm a nerd and enjoy taking notes." The four build options I sent de Saint were: - Debuff Summoner - Summons creatures to fight on their behalf and supports them (and the party as a whole) by also taking the School of Ailments. - Physical Mage - Combines the elemental and force schools of magic to create a dynamic combat caster. - Elemental Cannon - Specializes in one element at the expense of all others. - Enchanter - Creates spell scrolls and imbues items with spells.

In my dream mage build, expertly crafted at the age of 10 by copying a crawler I liked, I learned elemental magic and force magic, which was basically the physical mage build. To me, the cool thing about being a wizard was having several spell options. That level of versatility was hard for other classes to compete with, and casting one spell over and over for my entire life sounded boring. Taking just one school was way too limiting.

All of the spells I chose for my hypothetical build were good for combat, but I liked the utility of force magic as well. Even today, I could find all sorts of excuses to use Push or Pull if I were a mage, like moving the remote right when Nathan reached for it.

"How did you select these four?" de Saint asked.

"They're all pretty different from one another, so I wanted to have variety for you to react to. Enchanter is the least dungeon-focused of the four." I didn't directly mention her reluctance to dungeon crawl, but I still worried I came too close to revealing that I knew that much about her personal life. As we waited for the light to change to cross the street, de Saint mused, "Enchanter could be interesting, but I don't know how I would choose a specific version of the build."

Megan's triumphant smile grew even larger.

"Your biggest choice is breadth or depth," I explained.

"Do you want to be a generalist enchanter or a specialist?" Like all things magery, that build could go in several directions, but they were all motivated by two major rules of enchanting: You could only enchant items with spells you yourself could cast. The strength of the enchantment was based on how powerful the spell would be if you cast it the normal way.

Having a variety of enchanting options meant that they would be weaker compared to someone who leaned into a narrow specialization and used their unlocks to be stronger rather than more versatile.

"I think I'd prefer variety," de Saint stated after thinking a moment.

"When I have hands again," I joked because of all the tea I carried, "I can send you what that generalist build could look like."

"Thank you for talking me through it like this. Any time I tried to do it by myself, I got so overwhelmed."

"Happy to help." The level 10 generalist enchanter build I ended up sending her looked like this: Black Mage Path - Unlocks base spells. School of Elemental Magic - Learn the spells Bolt, Fire, Ice, Stone. School of Ailments - Learn the spells Poison, Weaken, Clumsy. Improved Casting - Strength of all spells is buffed, mana costs reduced for all spells. Meditation - An ability that brought on a state of deep focus where mana regenerates more swiftly.

Bigger Spells - Strength of all spells goes up as do their mana costs. Advanced Elemental Magic - Unlocks higher tier version of elemental spells. Inscription - Enables the creation of spell scrolls, also an enchanting prerequisite. Weapon Enchanting - Apply enchantments to compatible weapons. Expanded Mana Pool - Permanent mana pool increase. And the default bonus for level 10 was the same for all black mages: Improved Black Magic - Effectiveness of all spells increased while mana costs are decreased.

No enchanter build was optimized for dungeon crawling. Instead, an enchanter would get their levels and spend most of their career in a workshop. A decent mana pool was necessary for the strongest forms of casting, and without Meditation, she might only be able to enchant one item a day and then have to wait for all of her mana to recover naturally.

A combat build would include unlocks like Combat Casting, Ranged Casting, Improved Mana Regeneration, Silent Casting, and Sacrifice, a very different direction from a generalist enchanter. Sacrifice, by the way, was an unlock where you select a spell to permanently forget in exchange for a significant boost to mana regeneration. Once we were back in the office, and I gathered my things to officially go home, de Saint said to me, "Thank you again. I can't explain how helpful that was."

"No problem. I like geeking out about this stuff. Hit me up if you want to talk more."