When Enforcer McDouglas told me that Enforcer Chapman would make sure I “paid my penance,” he wasn’t joking.

  For the rest of the week, I was tasked with vetting crawler identification photos. Though it was much less common now, crawlers sometimes worked under someone else’s name and social security number. In some cases, the motivation was tax and income-related. Perhaps they personally owed back taxes or something like child support, so they crawled under a false name to keep their wages from being garnished or having to claim that income formally.

  Licensed crawlers were also subject to background checks. Someone with a simple assault charge would pass, but anything higher than that–aggravated assault, involuntary manslaughter, voluntary manslaughter, second-degree murder, and so on–required an appeal that was generally unlikely to succeed.

  Federal crimes and crimes of a sexual nature required appeals as well and were even less likely to go through. The CDM didn’t want known fraudsters processing dungeon loot, and they didn’t want to send people with violent histories into another dimension where they would most likely get away with whatever they wanted.

  So for each crawler license, I searched the same identifying information in other databases, like driver’s licenses, passports, mugshots, yearbooks, and social media.

  In three days of doing nothing but vetting license photos, I didn’t find a single file worth flagging. That made me wonder if I was even meant to find anything or if this exercise was simply a tedious, mind-numbing punishment.

  At night, Megan and I planned for our next hunt, if she wasn’t called in to clear a dungeon gate instead, that is.

  We were still on the search for information on hunting wild goblins but found little beyond the absolute basics: They liked dark, defensible locations for nests. They reproduced quickly. They often left garbage and other waste in the vicinity of their nest. A strong smell of feces mixed with rotting meat could be an indication of a nearby nest. They often used traps and ambush tactics.

  Our newest research project was on wild trolls. They were encountered far less often than goblins, but a single troll could be more dangerous than a goblin nest. Contrary to how fairy tales portray them, real trolls weren’t weak to sunlight, though they tended to avoid it by hunting at night.

  Trolls were faster and stronger than humans, comparable to a level 10, depending on who you asked. Like goblins, they were ambush hunters, but their preference for solitude changed the nature of that ambush.

  A goblin ambush was more akin to a military attack in the sense that it relied on positioning and numbers to a large degree. Watching for a goblin ambush meant being mindful of areas where multiple goblins could be hiding at once. They always attacked in groups, so the places they chose for ambushes had to accommodate that.

  If goblins set up an ambush inside of a house, they would choose a point where multiple goblins could come out of hiding all at once, like a foyer or a living room. One goblin wouldn’t go into a house alone and wait behind a door in a bedroom to attack, but a troll would.

  I found that to be much scarier. One troll had far more options for hiding than a group of goblins. Every corner, every doorway, every shadow–there could be a hungry troll lying in wait.

  On top of their craftiness was their most famous quality: regeneration. No injury was too serious for a troll’s healing ability. Whether you chopped its head off or ran a sword through its heart, it would repair itself and eventually become whole again. While the speed of their regeneration wasn’t such that you would watch its bloody stump regrow a new arm right there in front of you, it was fast enough that simple flesh wounds wouldn’t slow it down for long.

  A severed biceps or a spear through the stomach? They would stagger and adjust their defense, but in less than a minute, those major injuries became minor ones, and the troll fought on as savagely as ever.

  Burns were the only wounds trolls couldn’t heal, so slaying a troll always required the use of fire. If you chopped off its head, stick a torch in its mouth. That was the only way to be certain a troll was dead for good.

  Megan and I had no desire to fight a troll at that point in our crawling careers. We were underleveled, and as two martial classes, we lacked the rapid access to fire magic that casters enjoyed. That made our plan A for dealing with trolls simple and straightforward.

  Run.

  If running wasn’t an option, plan B had to mean mounting some form of meaningful offense. The only way for it to be meaningful was to involve a fire source of some kind.

  We considered all manner of potential solutions: handheld blowtorches, lanterns, lighters and hairspray, fireworks, gasoline and matches, and flamethrowers.

  I’m not joking about flamethrowers. We found a few places online that sold them, but we couldn’t afford them, and neither of us liked the idea of walking around with a backpack full of explosive liquid. Whether or not a flamethrower was legal to own was another question, but we never got so far as to answer it.

  Our best solution ended up being flares. We found some big ones with a pull-string lighter at a surplus store, and then we got a batch of road flares. They were smaller, lightweight, and easy to use but required a spark, which really just meant scraping the end on something.

  Really, though, I hoped we never saw a troll. If we did, I hoped we could run.

  That first Saturday after my falling out with Enforcer Chapman, Megan and I cleared a small goblin nest in a town called Slickville. They had infested a large, victorian house, but the nest was relatively small–thirteen kills in total, all grunts, no berserkers or other advanced varieties. While it felt good to do something with my bow, that simple hunt made me miss crawling even more.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  Beth and I agreed to get breakfast Sunday morning. Our work schedules meant that we hadn’t really seen each other since our parents surprised her at Milly’s that one night. We exchanged a few texts here and there, but it was minimal and far less personal than sitting across from Beth in a diner, watching her inhale ten pounds of pancakes and a liter of maple syrup.

  “How have you been holding up?” I asked.

  “You mean since the visit?”

  I nodded.

  “Everyone at work has been really cool about it,” Beth answered. “I’m still really freaking embarrassed about the whole thing, but I’m not getting fired again. That makes it a little better.”

  “Any idea how they found you in the first place?”

  Sighing, she said, “I messed up. Do you remember Amanda from down the street? I messaged her, thinking we could still be friends. She acted like she was on my side, but I think she was feeding it all to mom and dad. I didn’t tell anyone else about Milly’s. Only her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m sorry. You haven’t had to see them for so long, but then I bring them right to your doorstep.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I said. “All I care about is that you’re okay.”

  “I am. Are you?”

  I bounced my head side to side, thinking. “I thought I was cooked at work, but the disaster might not be total. One of the enforcers told me it would blow over if I stayed out of trouble for a bit. I still have my job, but I think I torched my relationship with an upper-level enforcer for good.”

  “Losing one person is better than losing everything.”

  “That’s true. I was doing good there for a bit, though, like she was starting to respect me. I threw that away for some XP.”

  “Jonathan has been doing a lot of research,” Beth said, changing the topic, “and apparently indie crawlers are getting decent jobs in South America. There’s a major shortage of people who can close gates down there.”

  “He wants to crawl that badly, huh?”

  “Mmhmm. He might drop out after this semester. Engineering doesn’t have the huge demand for talent that college recruiters sold him on. Upperclassmen he knew who graduated aren’t finding jobs.”

  “That sucks,” I said. “Is he serious about the South America thing?”

  “I think so. He’s the kind of person who will go for something even if other people think it’s crazy. No, I’m not thinking about going with him.”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You were going to ask.”

  “Was not.”

  Beth narrowed her eyes as she chewed. “I don’t want to go to South America, but part of my promise to you was to come up with a plan for my life. I’m not making any progress.”

  “I’m not worried about it.”

  “Well, I am,” she replied. “Figuring this out is hard because I don’t really know the world. I guess you understand that, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think I want to be a nurse or a physician’s assistant. I could take a few certifications and go into office work, but that doesn’t appeal to me either. Maybe I should drop that criterion completely and instead look for something I can at least tolerate.”

  “I’m sorry I don’t have more advice to give you,” I said. “I’ve not done a great job on that front either.”

  “What do you need to clear a C gate?”

  “You mean in terms of levels?” I wrinkled my face at the abrupt topic shift.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Six level 10s at least. From what I’ve seen, most people run parties of eight and want level 12s and up. Can I ask why?”

  Beth shrugged. “We could do the resettlement program too, get our own land to start over with.”

  I sensed a thread of seriousness in that statement, but I decided against explaining to her all the reasons that plan wouldn’t work either, one of the largest being the cost and complexity of reclaiming abandoned land. She already seemed beat down, and I didn’t want to add to that.

  “Admin work for a guild or a team doesn’t look so bad,” I offered. “That’s the most realistic target for me at this point.”

  “I really don’t want to live my life in front of a computer.” With only syrup and a few crumbs left on her plate, Beth absentmindedly traced shapes in the sticky residue with a tine of her fork.

  “I understand.”

  “Can I ask you something that might be upsetting?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Beth paused as if to think. “When do they stop having power over you? Mom and dad, I mean. When will I be immune to what they say and think about me?”

  “Beth…”

  “I need to know.”

  I wiped my mouth and took a sip of tea. “I keep thinking about how they came in person to get you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When mom figured out where I ended up, I got a letter or two a year. They never once came for me, but they came for you right away.”

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said.

  “Putting that together hurt. Still hurts, rather. I’m not surprised, and it shouldn’t bother me, but I hate knowing there was some kind of measurement in their mind where they decided I wasn’t worth it.”

  “It’s because you’re a man.”

  “Huh?”

  “Women are weak and irrational. I’m more like a runaway farm animal to them. Since you’re a man, what you did was deliberate betrayal. I’m not saying that one of us has it harder than the other, but it’s different in their minds.”

  I nodded. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I think you’re right.”

  “So you won’t move to Canada with me, eh?” Beth said with a grin.

  Laughing, I said, “Not for that plan, no, I won’t.”

  “If the plan was better, you would?”

  “My mind is open but realistic.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” Beth excused herself to use the restroom.

  While she was gone, I took a look at what kind of jobs a crawler could get in South America.