“What do you mean?”
“It occurred to me you could have felt pressured with how we went about it. Got me worried.”
“I was relieved, to be honest. I thought I offended you two somehow.”
“Nah, dude.”
“Thanks for asking,” I said. “Stop worrying about it. We’re good.”
“Alright, alright. Beth seems like she’s doing okay. Jonny Boy isn’t the tool I expected him to be.”
Chuckling, I replied, “Yeah. I judged him unfairly too.”
“Seems to be a fan of yours already.”
“What?”
“He looks up to you, bro. Don’t ask me why.”
I took my eyes off of my phone. “You’re not joking?”
Nathan laughed. “It’s not subtle.”
“Weird.”
“We’re not old, but we’re not eighteen anymore either. We’ve learned some shit.”
“That’s true,” I replied. “It’s still strange.”
“I don’t know, big bro,” Nathan joked, “You’re doing a pretty good job from where I sit.”
“Huh?”
Sighing, Nathan shook his head. “You’ll see it some day. Maybe.”
My phone buzzed.
“A D gate needs cullers by 11 p.m. Are you available?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thank you for your service. I am texting you the address now.”
When I hung up, Nathan looked at me quizzically. “Aren’t you on a medical hold?”
"Theoretically.”
Laughing, Nathan said, “Have a good crawl.”
This gate was well northeast of the city at the edge of the Allegheny Forest, my farthest voluntary cull to date. I needed a little over two hours to arrive, and I beat the captain and the guard there.
The gate, a log doorframe with a wooden door, was tucked into the forest but relatively close to dirt roads that deer hunters would use during hunting season. I parked with a decent view of the gate while being out of the way for the sake of the others. I turned off my car and waited.
About twenty minutes passed, and I saw five people with flashlights moving through the trees on the other side of the gate. Pausing in front of the door, they played their lights across each other to double-check their gear.
No one had armor that fit. One wore football pads and soccer shin guards. When a light caught their faces, my stomach twisted. These kids were sixteen or seventeen years old at most. From the few glimpses I got, they were nervous and unsure of themselves.
They did not look prepared for a D-ranked crawl. I was told repeatedly not to interact with crashers unless I absolutely had to, but these idiots were going to get themselves killed. If they didn’t, a team of CDM employees would come in behind them, at which point they would get charged as adults for gate crashing.
“Hey!” I yelled, stepping out of my car.
Five flashlights shone in my eyes.
“Who the hell are you?” one of the teens yelled.
“A whole team of CDM will show up here any minute.”
The boys muttered amongst themselves.
“Get out of here, and for the love of God, give up gate crashing. You’re going to get killed or arrested.”
“You just want the gate for yourself,” a voice replied. I still couldn’t see shit because of the flashlight.
“I’m trying to give you a break,” I said. I held up my CDM ID. “See? Now run. I’m serious that more are on their way.”
A few whispered words later, they turned tail.
I relaxed when their flashlights were deep enough into the woods that anyone arriving now was unlikely to see them. Aiding gate crashers was not a wise choice on my part, and I wasn’t sure what the repercussions would be if I was caught, but ruining the lives of broke teenagers was not why I joined the CDM.
I was in my car for a full five minutes before the others started to trickle in.
Phew.
We had three fighters for the frontline of this party, one of them being the captain, whom I hadn’t run with before. The guard, however, very much had my interest.
He was older, but he was fit enough that I couldn’t immediately pin his age. He had a grey crewcut and carried a sleek, black bow.
Finally! I got to see an experienced archer in action. I wished the CDM let us record these runs so I could just point the camera at him the entire crawl. He wasn’t very talkative and was a touch gruff, but he humored my questions.
The guard was a level 14 archer running a power build. While crawling with another dex archer would have been the ultimate ideal in terms of my development, I was no less excited.
Power builds looked hella cool in action anytime I saw them on a stream. A power archer invested in three primary areas: their strength stat, abilities that reduced the draw weight of a bow, and abilities that increased the damage or strength of individual arrows. You could argue that the fourth area was gear, but that was true of any high-level crawler. Getting the most out of your build always required the right tools.
The most interesting part about the build for me was its reliance on and abuse of traditional physics. Every bow has what’s called a “draw weight,” and that essentially measures the force required to pull back a bowstring.
A hunter with a recurve bow usually has a draw weight of 40 to 50 lbs. That’s what my bow was now, but that draw weight is on the low end for what other bows are capable of. If I were hunting a wild hog, for example, I’d want something more like 60 lbs. I would need at least that to run C gates, if I ever got that far.
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The higher the draw weight, the faster the arrow and the more force that arrow imparts on its target. In the context of crawling, that’s especially important because many monsters had thick, heavy hides or other such natural armor that a dinky arrow could never penetrate.
My build alleviated that weakness slightly with Sharpen, but I would still need to invest in a better bow with a higher draw weight. An English Longbow, for example, was usually around 100 lbs for a draw, so that was possible for a normal human to achieve with training, and I would need that extra force for tougher monsters.
With the system, this was addressed by a few investments in the strength stat. Without enough strength, not only will you struggle to get the string drawn, but your form is also likely to be shaky and unstable. Ever shake a little bit on the final rep of a hard set? It’s like that, which is unacceptable if monsters are trying to kill you.
Modern wild game hunters use a compound bow for this reason. The draw weight is still there, but at a certain point, the bow “holds” the weight for you, making aiming and firing easier. The system didn’t accept compound bows, though.
So, a power archer wants a high strength stat to increase the draw weight as high as possible. Taking abilities that lowered the difficulty of a draw weight–turning an 80 lbs draw into what felt like 40 lbs–further elevated the total draw strength the archer could impart. The abilities I’m referencing reduce draw weight by percentage and can stack.
So, halving the draw weight on a juiced-out strength base made some absurd options viable.
An average medieval crossbow can get up in the realm of 350 lbs for draw weight, hence the need for mechanical assistance in many of the designs. An arbalest, perhaps the strongest type of crossbow used in medieval combat, has a draw weight of 1,200 lbs. Those arrows punched through armor with ease, but an arbalest was a bitch to reload.
For reference, a siege ballista was in the realm of 8,000 lbs of draw weight. You needed to be pushing level 30 to get that far with a power build, but it was possible.
I didn’t know this particular power archer’s build, but his draw weight was probably in the 300s, which is not sustainable for a normal bow. It would shatter, so a heavy-duty bow made from dungeon materials was a necessity, and then you needed special arrows that could withstand that level of force.
The CDM quartermaster provided none of that, at least not to an intern like me, and that would become a problem for me eventually as well. A dex archer beat the hell out of bows too, but it was more through rapid, repetitious movements than raw power.
I almost missed the start of the run daydreaming about all of this because, as another first for me, this captain for this cull didn’t give a pre-run speech of any kind.
He simply said, “Let’s go,” and walked right into the gate.
The interior of this dungeon was the most alien environment I experienced to date. The passageways were rounded tunnels, but they didn’t run through stone or dirt. We were surrounded on all sides by wood.
When the captain sighed and said, “Termites,” the texture of the wood made more sense. Every surface was covered in horizontal scratches and grooves that were still raw, like someone had only recently run a dagger through fresh lumber.
Thousands and thousands of times over.
“How many of you have earplugs?” the captain asked.
Only the guard raised a hand. The rest of us did not, at least not with us. I had a pair in my nightstand to survive a bad night of stomp sisters.
The captain sighed. “Wait here.”
When he returned, he passed out disposable earplugs. “Ever been in a place infested with termites? You can hear them chewing, and that’s when they’re the proper Earth-size. These termites are two to four feet long, depending, and they’re loud. Running chainsaw loud. Pay attention for visual cues because you’ll have trouble hearing anything.”
Before I put my earplugs in, the guard for the run said to me, “You’re going to be more useful in here than me. These attack in numbers, and they can come through anything that’s wood. Above, below, whatever. Try to differentiate noise sources if you can. If you end up in a position where it’s possible, shoot straight into an active hole with Piercing Shot. Don’t go chasing that chance, but if it comes up, that will slow them down a good bit.”
I nodded and resisted, with great effort, doing a little happy jig right in front of the guard. That was the first piece of archer-specific tactical advice I had ever gotten on a run.
With my world muffled by earplugs, we began our trek down the wooden tunnel. It gently curved in places while dipping and rising in others. My earplugs shifted, filling my head with loud, staticy scratches every so often.
No, those weren't my earplugs.
Rising rapidly, the sound of thousands of scissors cutting paper over and over rumbled toward us from every direction, vibrating the tunnel. The closer they got, the more I could distinguish a gravel-like bass beneath the snip snip snips.
Sawdust and wet pulp sprinkled down from above us and pushed out of the wall to our left. The captain signaled to retreat, so we shuffled back a few paces. With the termites targeting where we were, that small adjustment kept us from being surrounded for the immediate future.
The heads that burst through ranged from the size of melons to the size of basketballs. Every termite had black, dagger-like mandibles in front of its mouth, a dark brown face, and long, pus-colored bodies. Their mandibles clapped together as they brandished them at us, crawling along the tunnel at all angles.
If they could chew through wood, I suspected getting through an arm or leg wouldn’t be too much trouble, so once again, I internally celebrated being in the backrow.
After his first three arrows, I knew the guard had been talking me up when he said I’d be more useful than he was. He was a higher level and thus had the stat points to invest in dexterity. His speed surpassed mine while still sticking to his power build. If our levels were equal, then I would have been faster.
But they weren’t, so he smoked me.
He was faster, stronger, and more accurate. His arrows exploded termite head after termite head, bursting them like milky balloons.
At times, the number of enemies racing toward us felt like being on a Roach Run, I barely had to aim. If I shot an arrow, it was almost guaranteed to hit a monster. I still made it a point to aim, seeing this as a chance for some forgiving target practice.
In Tailf3ther’s recent coaching email, I could hear his frustration through his writing. I practiced at the range without my helmet on but crawled with one. That shifted my anchor point enough that he told me no more practicing helmetless. In case you don’t remember, an anchor point is the place on my face where I rested my drawing hand.
So, I paid careful attention to my anchor point as I aimed.
On a few occasions, the termites came from directly above or below us while we stood our ground against a more visible horde. The shoot-straight-into-the-hole advice helped the most here. The termites following the two I killed would chew their bodies quickly to clear the way, but it bought me a few extra seconds that I was grateful to have.
These were just worker termites, the most basic variety of this particular monster.
Spitters used hardened wood pulp for projectiles, making them the termite equivalent of an archer. Dozers, like “bulldozers,” were larger than workers and coated themselves in wood pulp, letting it dry into a sort of armor. Squirters sprayed wet wood pulp that hardened quickly, slowing your movements and even sticking you in place if you weren’t careful. Poppers ran at you and exploded, spraying their steaming hot insides in every direction.
I later heard someone describe taking a popper explosion to the chest as being like having a pot of boiling water thrown at you.
The termite gate required a greater demand for concentration than any run I had done before. Losing audio cues, the number of enemies, the unpredictable angles from which they approached, and the variety of abilities they wielded meant a rapidly changing landscape of threats and challenges.
It was good training but also exhausting.
The boss for a termite dungeon was always a termite queen. She was fifteen feet long, and instead of the segmented bodies of her children, she looked like a termite head stuck to a chewed piece of white gum, and that white gum was followed by three more pieces of the same, all stuck in a row.
She was in a large, wedge-shaped chamber that was four stories at its tallest. Eggs surrounded the queen at the back of the room. All of the varieties of termites we had fought thus far burst from the eggs, but these had wings.
The guard’s power archer build showed its strengths in that fight. Between the large bursts of damage, his Bleed effect steadily drained the queen. The captain needed to run a little bit of interference to keep the queen at bay, and his strikes weren’t insignificant, but the guard definitely did most of the damage.
The rest of us kept the adds away, and when the fight finally ended, I was the most tired I had ever been after a run.
Sitting in my car afterward, I checked my system profile:
Dorion Carmino
Class: Archer
Level: 4
XP Progress: 691/800
Str: 6
Dex: 10
Con: 6
Int: 3
Cha: 3
Abilities:
- Piercing Shot
Traits:
- Ranged Accuracy
- Improved Reload
- Sharpen
Spells: (none)
That felt like enough work to push me to level 5, but I could settle for taking a big step forward. The long drive home might have been more dangerous than the run, though. My eyes were heavy, and I felt myself slipping in and out sometimes.
Falling asleep at the wheel would be a lame way to go. When I was a kid, I never understood how someone could do that, but as I drifted onto the shoulder a few times that night, I felt how relentless exhaustion could be.