McDouglas, wearing a powder blue polo, set his phone on the dash. We had been staked out for three or four hours so far away from the city that we were nearly in Ohio. The majority of CDM people, from enforcers to investigators, had tagged at least one gate crasher. After five shifts, the most interesting thing I saw was a prostitute. McDouglas shooed her away.

  Other than that? Nothing but dead air. But this was technically Friday morning now. This blitz nonsense was almost over.

  This D-ranked gate was in the woods not far from one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it towns, the kind with empty storefronts and no stoplights. I thought the town was abandoned, but McDouglas insisted there were a handful of people still living there. Sure enough, we saw a house turn a light on when it got dark.

  That was the only sign of permanent residents I saw the whole time we were there. One house light.

  As for the gate itself, it looked like an old sliding barn door. It was nothing but shades of green in the drone’s night vision, but when I saw it in the daylight, it was weathered gray with claw marks in the wood.

  Both of us passed much of the time on our phones, which was equally as dull as the stakeout. Only one interesting story caught my eye: “Georgia Island Goblin Extermination Planned.”

  First of all, I didn’t know that Georgia had islands. In my mind, I pictured Georgia is entirely landlocked, which I now realized was a wholly imaginary version of the United States because the state was part of the Atlantic coastline. I nearly mentioned this little moment of learning to McDouglas, but I decided admitting such things didn’t portray me in the best–smartest–light.

  At any rate, one of Georgia’s islands was privately owned and had a sprawling Spanish-style mansion with pink stucco walls, clay rooftiles, and a brick patio flanked by arches and columns. Ossabaw Island also had a number of other structures and amenities in its prime, but when the dungeon gates opened, the family abandoned it in favor of safer accommodations in the city of Savannah.

  Other than watching satellite footage for gate appearances, the island had been mostly forgotten by locals until two recreational fishermen discovered that it had been overrun by goblins. The nest was believed to be large enough to have a goblin king, which in dungeon terms would qualify the island as a B-ranked or A-ranked gate, depending on the number and variety of minions.

  Social media seemed to believe a team of mages would flatten the whole island from the safety of a boat instead of attempting to go ashore.

  “I got the sense that money was a bit tight with how much you have to take care of,” McDouglas began, breaking a long silence in the car. “Buddy of mine has an opening for some weekend work. If I’m poking my nose in your private life, though, you can tell me.”

  “I could use the work, yeah. What is it?”

  “Have you heard of the Reboot Rebuild program?”

  “Umm…”

  “It doesn’t matter that you haven’t,” McDouglas said. “They’re demolishing all those old, empty towns we got all over the state. Cleaning them up looks better, is good for the environment, they say, and makes building new stuff a little easier if or when that happens.”

  “Okay. That makes sense.”

  “They have to sweep every structure to confirm it’s empty, and they prefer crawlers because there is a chance there’s a monster or two bedding down in there instead of people. It’s not glamorous, and it’s a lot of walking, but it pays.”

  My eyes went wide. “That sounds great! Thank you for doing that.”

  McDouglas picked up his phone and poked around for a few seconds. “I sent his info to your email. If you want to work this weekend, he’s got a call-off.”

  “I do,” I said, grabbing my phone. Jumping on this right now might guarantee me the spot.

  Then it was back to staring at the tablet, watching the gate from the perspective of the drone we had floating over the site.

  A couple of hours later, McDouglas was asleep while I was on watch. When I saw movement on the tablet screen, I thought I imagined it at first. I looked again and squinted my eyes. Six figures approached the gate.

  “I think we got something,” I said.

  McDouglas rubbed his eyes and reached for the drone controller. He lowered the drone to try and get a better look. All six crashers wore some variety of camo, but the two shortest had ratty ringmail over theirs.

  “Are those two kids?” I asked.

  “Teenagers looks like,” McDouglas replied. “You’ll see that sometimes. A few extra stat points can be a big deal for blue-collar types. Makes their lives easier.”

  “So they’re helping their kids level?”

  “Yep.”

  The crashers huddled up around the gate and appeared to be speaking to one another. A minute later, they slid the barn door open and entered the dungeon.

  McDouglas passed me the drone controller. “Stay here. See if you can find their cars with the drone and get footage of the license plates. I’ll get the trail cam set up. Radio me if you need something.”

  I needed a few minutes of circling the gate’s location to find a car and a pickup truck parked in a nearby field. I did as McDouglas asked and took footage of the license plates. When that was done, I flew the drone back to the gate.

  From overhead, I caught glimpses of McDouglas mounting the trail cam to a tree. I suddenly got very nervous. What if the crashers came back out just then? Maybe a group with kids wouldn’t attack a CDM enforcer, but then again, maybe protecting their children from prosecution would make them more likely to attack.

  I didn’t know McDouglas’ level or class, but four on one was bad odds. A few system-juiced kids could be just as dangerous as adults, so it might even be six versus one.

  But nothing happened. Because of the tree cover, I wasn’t sure if McDouglas had finished or not, but I didn’t see him anymore.

  Then he was back in the car.

  “I bet they come back out in…” He looked at the time on his phone. “Seventeen minutes.”

  Next, he scrubbed backward through the drone footage on the tablet to check the quality of my license plate footage.

  “Good work,” he said. “Some basic competency is nice to see.”

  “Seventeen minutes? You’re that sure on the timing?”

  “Most of the crashing Discords recommend thirty-minute runs. Fight as deep as you can for twenty-five minutes. Run out the last five. A few will say push it to forty-five, but that’s a lot more time to get caught.”

  Discord was a text and voice chat platform. As Discord grew more popular, internet communities that used to run on message boards and forums became as empty as the town at my back. They all moved to Discord.

  “Gate crashers have a Discord?” I asked.

  “There’s a bunch of them.”

  “That seems brazen.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  McDouglas shrugged. “You can find a group or anything. None of the incriminating or actually illegal stuff happens in public channels. Advocating for gate crashing isn’t a crime, unfortunately.”

  “Too bad you can’t trace back who’s leaking gate locations in the first place.”

  Only licensed crawlers could access the platform to bid on gates, so for gate crashers to regularly know where new gates had appeared, people with licenses had to be sharing that information. Cracking down on leaks like that wasn’t really possible, however. Too many crawlers had licenses for the CDM to ever hope for total compliance.

  “Are you, like, doing an undercover Discord investigation?” I asked.

  “Ha! No. Nothing like that. I read the general threads, and that’s it. The longstanding crashing communities have a personal verification requirement. They don’t let you into any of the private channels until an existing member has vouched for you and one of the mods has met you in person.”

  “Wow.”

  “It’s not like you can blame them,” McDouglas continued. “I get why people crash gates. I wish I could get people in my family a few levels, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Bam!” he shouted and pumped his arm. “They were in the gate for thirty-two minutes. Pretty damn close to exact.”

  I leaned in to squint at the tablet. “That kid looks hurt.”

  “Lower the drone a bit.”

  I did. An adult man with a sword on his back carried one of the teen crawlers in his arms. Nobody looked like they were dying, but the kid’s forearm was bent in the middle, he bled from a few cuts, and he bawled.

  “Do we go help?” I asked.

  “Nope. We are not to engage crashers, period. We call it in and let the investigators take it from there.” McDouglas was already scrolling through his contacts. “Yes, hello. This is Enforcer McDouglas. I’m on surveillance and have a child endangerment situation to report. Yep. I’ve got the license plates right here. Ready? Okay, the first plate is…”

  I went door-to-door at an abandoned motel on the Monongahela river. Any room that wasn’t already open, I had instructions to break in with my crowbar.

  I wore goggles, gloves, and a heavy fabric jumpsuit, all meant to put a barrier between me and the many sharp edges or loose debris to be found in decrepit buildings. A breathing mask completed the ensemble, and I was advised that taking it off, even for a break, was very stupid. The mold and loose asbestos in these places could do all kinds of nasty things to my lungs and body if I inhaled them.

  When we finished our sweep of the first level, we looked for stairs to the second. Before we went up, Sean inspected the staircase. He was my assigned partner for the day. A bulky man a few years older than me, he was a legitimate civil engineer. While I was not much more than an extra set of hands, Sean stayed on the lookout for potential dangers to us or to the demolition crew that would come through later.

  He gently pushed on the railing. The whole staircase wobbled.

  “Nope,” Sean declared. “We’re not going up that.”

  We walked back to Sean’s SUV. He pulled out a bullhorn.

  “This is the Department of Health and Safety. This structure is scheduled for demolition. I am not the police, and you are not in trouble, but you need to leave this area immediately. Again, this is…”

  Sean repeated himself three times in total.

  He put the bullhorn away and logged that the second floor was inaccessible. Then we moved onto the next building.

  This particular coal mining town was on the edge of the river at the bottom of a near-vertical cliffside. The town had enough space for a road down the middle and houses on either side, but there wasn’t space for yards. To my left, every structure was built right up to the edge of the river. On my right, they built right up to the rock face.

  Where in the city you would expect at least a few alleys wide enough to walk down, every building in this town was connected to the one next to it, creating an unbroken worm of old brick that remained roughly parallel to the bends in the road, never wasting an inch of build space.

  One by one, we entered each house. Sean would yell to announce us, and then we searched every room for people, which included the attic and the basement, if the house had them.

  The largest house on the street was three stories and had enough space inside to be carved up into seven apartments. Three on the first two floors, and then one on the third floor, which we wouldn’t be searching. The door to that apartment had no landing or stairs to speak of. Whatever used to lead up there was long gone.

  We started with the leftmost door. Sean stood back while I pried my way through the doorframe. When the door finally popped, Sean kicked it the rest of the way open.

  As he stepped into the doorway, he started his script for announcing our presence but stopped.

  He sniffed.

  “Shit, there’s-”

  A goblin burst out, knocking Sean over. The goblin wasn’t even half his size, but it had hurled itself like a rocket and taken him by surprise. The goblin stabbed downward, wielding a shard of glass like a knife.

  Sean blocked with his forearm to protect his chest, and the glass cut right through his work sleeves and embedded in his arm.

  Cursing, Sean tossed the goblin aside.

  As I moved in to help, another came through the door. I brained it with my crowbar. Sean grabbed me as he ran back to the road.

  I caught a glimpse of the goblin that had the shard of glass. Sean had stomped its head into the porch floor when I wasn’t looking.

  “Move, move, move,” Sean yelled.

  I already was. I ran and jumped potholes as quickly as I could.

  When we neared the car, Sean yelled, “In! In! Lock your door!”

  We threw ourselves inside, him in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger’s. As he slammed his key into the ignition, I looked through the windshield.

  A dozen goblins chased after us. Farther down the road from the direction we had just come, more came out of the house. Some ran down the stairs. Some leapt over the porch railing. They all had savage murder in their eyes.

  Rocks and bricks bounced off the hood. One lodged in the windshield, and I heard the roof over my head bend and dent.

  Sean put the SUV in drive and plowed through the goblins, all the cracks in the windshield making it nearly impossible to see.

  Their green bodies went in every direction. Some rolled over the top, and some ended up under our tires. We bounced violently, and I couldn’t tell what bounce was from a pothole and what bounce was from a goblin corpse.

  “Call it in!” he commanded.

  “I don’t know how!” It was my first day, after all.

  “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Then the volume of the chaos abruptly lowered. We had gotten through the horde and now sped dangerously fast down a winding road littered with holes, standing water, and loose gravel.

  A minute later. He slammed on the brakes.

  “Watch behind us,” Sean said.

  He grabbed his phone.

  “Yes,” He began, holding the phone to his ear. “We made contact with a goblin nest. The car is a mess, and I imagine our tires are shot too. Okay, thank you.”

  Sean put the phone down.

  “See anything?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Fucking bastards,” Sean cursed. He dug in the console for the first aid kit. “Can you put this on? Might be easier with two hands.”

  There was enough blood for me to know the wound was deep, but there wasn’t enough for me to think Sean’s life was in danger. I packed gauze on top of the cut and wrapped it tightly to maintain pressure.

  “Thanks,” he said. He tapped the screen on the car dashboard. “We’ve got a rendezvous point for backup. Check our six once more and help me kick this thing out.”

  No goblins had appeared to pursue us. Mimicking Sean, I curled my knees to my chest and used both feet to kick the windshield out. We could see properly again. When Sean put the SUV back into drive, I could feel what he meant about the tires being wrecked. We were absolutely destroying the rims, but we didn’t have a choice but to drive on them.

  “Haven’t seen a goblin nest in ages,” Sean said when his adrenaline finally came down. “Makes a guy happy he got to level 3.”

  “So that wasn’t normal?”

  Sean laughed. “No, it wasn’t, but it might be now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Those little bastards reproduce like rabbits. This area has been quiet for a while, but if there's one nest, it usually means there are a few. Could be years until they're contained again. If you smell a bunch of fresh feces, say so and get your guard up.”

  “You ever try to kill a few for XP?” I asked.

  Sean laughed. He winced and groaned when an exceptionally deep rut bounced his wounded arm.

  “Everyone thinks that's a good idea until they try it,” he said. “Twenty-five goblins or so for 1 XP? Gets old fast.”

  “It's something, though.”

  “Like I said, you're not the first. Coming back here alone would be a dumb thing to do, by the way. Goblin nests are easy to underestimate, and they know it.”

  I raised my hands. “I wasn't thinking about doing that.”

  Which was mostly true. I didn't specifically want to come back to this exact place to hunt goblins, but I realized how willing I was to spend a Saturday or a Sunday killing Earth-side monsters.

  Even if the XP was shit.

  For now, though, I wasn't that desperate to level. The CDM culls may have been sporadic, but I was still moving forward. Any off-hours I had outside of the dungeon were best spent making money.

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