S-rank gates are fairly rare. An area the size of Pennsylvania sees one or two per decade at most. The monsters inside a gate of that level are living natural disasters. Many historians argue that the fall of South America began when an S-ranked gate opened in Rio de Janeiro. A legendary basilisk appeared in the middle of the city when no one could close the gate.

  Its petrifying gaze made the ruins of Rio legendarily haunting, littering the streets with stone victims, but most people died from the poison gas it secreted through its skin.

  A normal basilisk was about the size of a train car, making it large but far from the largest monster. Legendary basilisks were two to three times that size. The real problem, though, was that basilisks were highly territorial. No one could get to any of the dungeon gates in its domain–which was effectively the whole city at that point–and those gates started to surge as well. The fall of the continent cascaded from there.

  In addition to the power of the monsters inside, S-ranked dungeons were difficult to clear because they could be unpredictably bizarre and have extreme variations in how long they remained open.

  Every other gate remained open for nine days before it surged.

  An S gate with a tower-climb-style dungeon was once open for a month, while a boss-rush-style S gate was only open for four days. The energy signatures satellites used to detect gates also revealed how long until they surge, by the way. That’s how we know the duration ahead of time.

  LootLootLouis and his party stood on a grand island floating in the stars. Above them, dozens more islands hovered in midair, connected by walkways and staircases made of quartz. The view from below was limited, but at least a few of the islands had castle-like structures on them, while others looked like wild, overgrown forests.

  Other than those islands, there was nothing but stars stretching infinitely in every direction. Even through the lens of a streamer’s camera, looking over the edge of a cliff and seeing stars below tickled a unique sort of primitive panic for me.

  When we tuned in, the party had just killed several winged humanoids, all capable of casting lethal elemental spells. They were the same black as the sky, making them difficult to track in the chaos of a fight. From what chatters were saying, Louis and company had been ambushed by this kind of monster early on and now knew to watch the skies diligently.

  For most streams, Louis would respond to chat and banter with party members as a crawl progressed. That wasn’t happening here. The stream was running, but Louis ignored it entirely to focus on the challenge of the dungeon.

  “It’s beautiful…” Beth said, mesmerized by the scenery.

  “Seeing that in person must be amazing,” Megan added. “What a rush to experience something like that.”

  “You want to run an S gate some day?” Nathan asked.

  Megan laughed. “I have a better chance of becoming president. I would love it if I could.”

  “Could get a job on a wild wall,” I said. “You could fight an S-ranked monster or two at least. That’s close.”

  Beth looked around. “Wild wall?”

  I answered, “Crawlers get bounties to watch the line where civilization ends and the wilds begin. Gates are releasing monsters all the time out there, so a few S-ranked monsters inevitably wander too close–if those gates aren’t closed proactively, that is. Usually are so its As and Bs.”

  Beth followed up with, “Does the XP suck for those too?”

  Megan nodded. “Yep. Money’s good, though.”

  “I’m reading it’s a twenty-day gate,” Nathan announced.

  “Will it take that long to clear?” Beth asked.

  “No way to know with an S-gate,” Megan answered. “This crawl might be all anyone talks about for the next week at least.”

  Beth blushed suddenly and seemed to shrink. “I’m asking so many questions. I’m sorry.”

  Smiling, Megan said, “I didn’t notice. You’re fine.”

  From what I could tell, Louis had yet to reach any of the structures in the dungeon. He was still on the island where he first entered, hacking through dense forest punctuated by the occasional meadow where the darkness monsters swooped in to attack.

  There was no trail or corridor for him to follow. His party had to decide their own direction and see where they ended up. Sometimes, Louis used a scouting drone on these streams. I got the sense he had already, and we missed it. He was probably conserving the battery for a potentially long run.

  Beth spoke softly to me. “A crawl like this makes the demon idea sound not so crazy.”

  “That dungeon monsters are biblical demons, you mean?” I asked.

  “An awe-inspiring impossible place. Monsters of literal darkness.”

  “I still get scared I’m wrong sometimes,” I said, trying not to embarrass Beth.

  “That you’ll go to hell?”

  “Yep.”

  Beth tilted her head. “I didn’t think you had doubts about your beliefs.”

  “Whatever part of my brain controls that fear isn’t connected to the part that handles logic. It’s like turning off the lights and worrying that something suddenly emerged from hiding the moment you hit the switch. So many years of being afraid of hell makes it kind of permanent, I think.”

  “I thought that was just me.”

  I smiled reassuringly. “I’m told it’s pretty universal, actually.”

  “Watching this makes me want to be a crawler.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  I sat up to look at her but regretted it. After a few very focused breaths, I said, “You’d probably be good at it.”

  “Really?”

  “All those goblins you killed? That doesn’t happen by accident. I don’t recommend it as a career path, though.”

  “You’re going to figure something out with crawling. I know you will.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say,” I replied. “It’d be great if you were right.”

  My leave gave me a lot of time to think.

  I scrolled through a few postings for guild and crawl team admin positions. Being a crawler manager like Kara over at the Homestead Strikers didn’t really sound all that bad when I admitted to myself I was childishly fixated on having a crawl-career-or-nothing.

  Some of the open jobs admittedly paid worse than what I would make at the CDM, but I saw enough over that threshold to feel reasonably optimistic about landing a decent position.

  This was one step closer to quitting crawling for good, I realized. That dream wasn’t dead completely, though. Taking the opportunity to level up would be good for me no matter where I went, and maybe I would get lucky after all and find an invitation from a prestigious guild scout waiting for me one morning.

  My practical plan and my fantasy plan both required the same work from me to succeed: use every opportunity I could to grow and improve with the CDM.

  Crawler manager. Harvest site director. Partner liaison. Quartermaster. I had some viable options with the chance at upward mobility. I wouldn’t make crawler money, but aiming for that was naive from the start. My more realistic goals would still make daily life less financially stressful.

  I emailed Grensmith at the end of my second day off to let him know that I didn’t need to take more than three. I would be back at my desk on Friday.

  On my third day off, I went to an ear, nose, and throat specialist to get my nose properly set and packed. I had done nothing but mouth-breathe since the fight, waking every night with dry, cracked lips and cottonmouth. Setting my nose didn’t help with that. It only added the pressure of having what felt like a blanket stuffed up my nostrils.

  If you’ve never had a blanket shoved up your nose, it isn’t pleasant.

  Somewhere in that time, Grensmith replied with instructions for me to report to a different floor entirely Friday morning: B306–records storage.

  The basement wasn’t as dark and dingy as I expected. The ceilings were a little low, and the white linoleum in the hallways had a permanent stain down the middle from decades of foot traffic, but the basement wasn’t all boiler rooms and broken lights like it would be on TV. I couldn’t see windows from my cubicle upstairs, and I couldn’t see windows down here either.

  The door to B306 was open when I finally found it, so I let myself inside.

  “Take your time getting to work every morning?” a woman asked from behind a desk surrounded by green metal filing cabinets and overstuffed shelves. She had the tense face of someone who was perpetually flustered and frustrated at all moments of her life.

  “Oh, my email said 8 a.m. Was that wrong?” my voice had a muffled, nasally quality from all the cotton in my face.

  It was 7:55 a.m.

  “If you’re not early, you’re late.”

  “Okay,” I said, hoping for the conversation to move on.

  “They told me you were injured, but they didn’t tell me it was this severe.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She gruffed, “I’m not worried about you. If you get blood on anything, that’s a biohazard, and you’re obligated to report it. Failing to report a biohazard can be a criminal offense, you know.”

  “I’ll be vigilant.”

  “Nobody appreciates how little body fluid a contagious disease needs.”

  I nodded. “How can I help?”

  “We have a mandate to digitize our archives. Your job is to scan in paper records, ensure that the text is properly recognized and searchable, and then label the materials with their new serial numbers, at which point they will be transferred to long-term storage.”

  Her use of “your” instead of “our” was telling.

  The process was fairly simple. I typed in the name of the document I was about to scan, put page after page on the scanner, confirmed the document was cleanly stored and that the text was searchable, and slapped a new barcode on the old folder.

  “Remember that as a CDM employee, you signed a non-disclosure agreement,” she added. “Taking photos or making personal copies of these files is a crime, as is distributing those files.”

  “Understood.”

  Not that I would have leaked anything regardless, but I doubted that the CDM would assign an intern to a project with truly sensitive materials.

  And then she was gone. I didn’t realize until later that she never introduced herself.

  Whatever.

  Being alone in the basement wasn’t all that bad once I got into a groove. I hadn’t seen or heard a single other person on this floor, and miraculously, I got cellphone reception. I turned on the LootLootLouis S gate livestream and let it play in the background as I went about preserving CDM history.

  The first two cabinets were all membership records for guilds and crawl teams. The CDM was established in 1962, and the oldest rosters I found were from 1968. A fair few of these crawlers were still alive, but I doubted any were still active.

  Name, ID number, class, level, and the length of their membership with their chosen organization–thousands of lines filled full reams of paper. These records were updated annually, it seemed, so I could track the careers of random names across years of crawling careers. I recognized none of the names, so any face and backstory I attached to an entry was purely imaginary.

  Still, I couldn’t help but feel proud of Chet Franklin when he finally leveled up to level 16 after idling at level 15 for three years running.

  Whenever my ability to entertain myself stumbled, LootLootLouis was there to fill in the gaps. My first day in the records room was the fourth day of the S-ranked crawl. His party spent nearly three days progressing from floating island to floating island before reaching an island with an actual structure.

  The flying shadow monsters still attacked regularly any time there was open sky, and chat had taken to calling them “jumpscares.” That’s how everyone, crawlers and viewers, reacted when they attacked. Sometimes, one of the crawlers would spot one early, catching a flicker in the stars where a silhouette passed by, but usually, the monsters were discovered moments before they landed an attack.

  Louis’ party was experienced enough that their reaction speed spared them many serious injuries. What they did sustain, the white mage of the party could easily remedy.

  Those attacks stopped whenever they were indoors.

  The first structure they encountered was a tower, and from below it appeared that the top floor of the tower joined three floating islands together. At least two of those islands had other towers on them, but the details were difficult to confirm from that low of a vantage point. The towers were too high for a drone to efficiently scout ahead, as well. The party would have to wait until they beat the tower to see what was up there.

  So far, that tower was patrolled by constructs forged from meteorite. A few were humanoid in design, but most were more insect-like, twisting and climbing with the agility of centipedes.

  The most curious discovery was that these constructs weren’t autonomous. Each one was tied to a small pool of black water that was suspended upside down from the ceiling, defying conventional physics. If a pool was destroyed, any construct associated with it ceased to function.

  Strangely, these pools had no visible enchantments or technology. The water rippled and whispered in a strange language, leading some to speculate that these pools weren’t machines but rather sapient monsters commanding soldiers.

  I looked forward to watching the stream over the weekend, but I feared that the run would be over before Monday, at which point I would have to find something else to break the silence of B306.

  https://www.patreon.com/c/marshalcarper