“This is your desk,” he said.

  He never actually shared his name. When he saw that my ID matched his list, he told me to follow him. Between the lobby and my corner of the fourth floor, he didn’t say anything at all. When I say “my corner,” I mean that collectively. Six desks were crammed into the cubicle, three on either side, and the five interns already there had to suck in their stomachs and pull their chairs tight to their desks for me to pass.

  “Username is last name, first name. Your password is your birthday. Log in, change your password, and then start the orientation module.”

  And he was gone.

  “They’re not being rude,” the woman next to me whispered. She was noticeably petite and wore dark-rimmed glasses. “They’ve got a pile of reports to process before end of day. We’ve had a rash of dungeon crashers, and it’s created a mess.”

  I nodded.

  “Dungeon crashers are people who sneak into dungeon gates,” she added.

  “I knew that.”

  “Wasn’t trying to be rude either.”

  I raised my hands. “No, no, it’s okay. I didn’t take it that way.”

  “Good. We get kicked around a lot. You need a thick skin. I’m Megan, by the way.”

  “Dorion.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “My mom liked books.”

  “Right. Sure. I’ll stop bothering you.”

  I sat. My chair wobbled, and the hard plastic frame beneath the cushion poked through. The mouse felt cheap, and the login screen hung for a frustratingly long amount of time. I changed my password, and I started orientation.

  The Center for Dungeon Management was a well-known federal agency, so I learned relatively little from the 127 slides I cycled through. Most of it was recent history.

  For reasons still unknown, dungeon gates appeared around the world, and humans everywhere were introduced to the system. Pretty quickly, we figured out that not running dungeon gates led to dungeon surges, which loosed all manner of monsters into the world. Adjusting to the new normal sowed a great deal of chaos and ended an untold number of lives.

  That was seventy years ago. We only recently reclaimed South America for humanity, so talks had begun about doing the same for Asia, an even bigger challenge. My grandfather was alive for the beginning of all of this, and he described pre-dungeon-Asia as having the most populated countries in the world. Multiple historians believed that China and India in particular had the capacity to become global powerhouses of technology and manufacturing.

  That was always hard for me to picture. How could so many people lose to monsters?

  Japan and Taiwan, who survived because of their island isolation, blamed Europe. The bar corner pundits would say those countries had to put the onus on Europe because dead Soviets can’t take responsibility or pay restitution. It was more profitable to pitchfork the countries still around. Anyone not from Japan or Taiwan blamed the Soviet Union.

  The gates opening so soon after World War II hastened the Soviet Union’s demise, and no one disagreed with that conclusion. Not only was the country mired in corruption, but its people still reeled from 25 million war casualties and an extreme shortage of resources. The dungeon gates they knew about were rarely closed, but it was the gates they didn’t know about that ultimately led to Asia’s fall, or so we were taught in high school history.

  Back then, we had no way to detect the appearance of gates in isolated areas and vastly underestimated how many there could be. We now know that gates have an equal chance of appearing on land anywhere in the world, so the vast frozen stretches of uninhabited Soviet Union land were just as likely to get a gate as Manhattan. The difference was no one was around to witness most of the gates in the Soviet Union, so no one closed them.

  The Soviet Union’s legendarily brutal winter killed many of the monsters that emerged from gates, but eventually ice-type monsters surged. They thrived in the cold, naturally, and the more isolated villages had no way to fight them and no way to call for help. In other words, the people who might have sounded the alarm never got the chance.

  Then spring came, and all manner of monsters surged forth to join the ice-type monsters.

  The Soviet Union refused outside help and was overrun. By the time the rest of the world realized intervention was a necessity in everyone’s best interests, so many dungeon gates had surged that nuclear strikes seemed like the only option.

  The Center for Dungeon Management, or CDM, didn’t give a shit about what happened in Asia. They only beat this story to death because it was the ultimate justification for their existence. Without the CDM managing gates and crawlers, American society was doomed to fall, just like the communists.

  Finally, I reached the final registration step of the orientation module. This was all information I had submitted before on multiple occasions. Allegedly, they asked new hires to repeatedly fill in the same forms in an effort to catch falsified profiles, like someone hiding their level or their class.

  After working there, I laugh when anyone acts like the repetitive data entry is by design. It wasn't. We had three databases that depended on crawler profiles. None of them could sync to one another, and we didn’t have budget for an IT project that big.

  When I finished my intake, it looked just like my system profile:

  Dorion Carmino

  Class: Archer

  Level: 1

  XP Progress: 1/100

  Str: 4

  Dex: 5

  Con: 4

  Int: 3

  Cha: 3

  Abilities: (none)

  Traits: Ranged Accuracy

  Spells: (none)

  My 1 XP came from killing fifteen giant rats when I was a kid. I was in the loft of a barn when I spotted the monsters below. I dropped hay bales on them and got in trouble for ruining all that perfectly good hay with rat guts.

  I told myself that every intern started with system profiles like mine. I didn’t know the other five interns working around me, but I suspected they were there for the same reason I was: a job at the CDM was our only chance to earn XP. We couldn’t afford licenses or dungeon fees to earn XP on crawls, and grinding the wilds was as dangerous as it was impractical.

  Any monster that escaped a dungeon was considered “wild,” and the areas overrun by such monsters were called “the wilds.” Though these were all monsters that once inhabited dungeons, the system made their XP value nearly worthless when they crossed over into our world. A 500 XP kill in a dungeon was a 5 XP kill when that same monster went wild. No change in difficulty. Just less XP.

  The mana crystals found inside monsters remained after they escaped a dungeon gate, but they were useless black charcoal if you cut them out, so there was no money to be had in wild monster hunting either.

  The CDM managed gate access, dungeon fees, licensing requirements, and another dozen tedious administrative functions. Crawlers had to be licensed, and the rights to run gates were purchased via a government web portal, with the highest-level gates sold in an auction format. If you weren’t licensed and didn’t have the rights, you weren’t permitted to enter the dungeon, even if no one ever bid on it. Low-level gates in remote areas were most prone to going unclaimed.

  Even a low-level dungeon surge could decimate a community, so the CDM deployed crawlers to close those gates before that could happen, giving an intern like me the chance to get some real dungeon time. Some argued those gates should be open to the public to allow crawlers who couldn’t afford licensing and training a chance to break into the industry, but the government didn’t believe in giving anything away for free.

  So the CDM had “cullers” who were dedicated to clearing dungeons about to surge. Low-level schlubs like me comprised the majority of that force, but they had a handful of elite units who flew around the country to close gates no one else could. For example, if a gate opened on Mount Rainier in the middle of winter, that gate still needed to be closed, so the high-level CDM cullers would get sent in. The money was shit, though, so the best crawlers at that level were in guilds or on teams.

  No, I didn’t have dreams of becoming an elite culler. I just wanted enough levels that I could luck into a decent crawl team and make some okay money for once in my life.

  When I completed the orientation, a whole new set of modules loaded. I had six more trainings to complete in the next three days. The topics ranged from data-logging procedures for crawls with fatalities to the liability policies for cullers who err on the job. For example, unless you were a healer class, any first aid we provided had to be within set boundaries, which was several steps below what care paramedics could legally provide patients. If you violated a policy like that, the liability fell back on you, the individual.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  I loaded a module titled “Trouble in the Dungeon: Good Samaritan Considerations Across Classes” and started to read.

  “Osheski, grab your bag,” a voice said.

  A man in a tight pink polo with similarly tight jeans leaned over the intern cubicle, addressing the girl who introduced herself as Megan. His head was shaved to stubble, and his beard was shaped to a manicured point to emphasize his jawline–or, perhaps, to give him one. Who knew what kind of chin was or wasn’t under that beard.

  “Sorry,” she replied with a frown. “Enforcer Meyers has me on something.”

  The man sighed. “Leminson?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Saito?”

  “Wish I could.”

  The man grumbled, “Which one of you is actually available?”

  Megan jerked her head in my direction. “He is. First day.”

  “Name?” he asked me.

  “Dorion Carmino, sir.”

  “Dorion?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Alright, Gray, you’re with me. Grab your kit and meet me at the elevator in five.”

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, “but I said my last name was Carmino.”

  “Nah, you’re Gray now. Carmino sounds too badass for an intern.”

  When he turned, I called, “Wait! I don’t have a kit.”

  “For the love of- Fine. Go to the elevators and wait for me there.”

  And then he was gone.

  “Good luck, Gray,” Megan said with a playful snicker.

  A few minutes later, the man appeared at the elevator and pushed a bag into my arms. A round shield and a sheathed sword were tied to it.

  We got in, and he pushed the button for the ground floor.

  “I’m an archer, sir.”

  “If you actually need that kit, we’re both dead. Well, I’ve got a shot at getting out. You’re definitely dead.”

  I nodded.

  We found our way to the parking garage and got into an SUV with CDM emblazoned on the doors in white and blue.

  “So… do I call you Mr. Pink?” I joked.

  “Absolutely not,” the man gruffed back. “Enforcer McDouglas.”

  Making friends your first day anywhere was always so much fun.

  “I know you're new,” he continued, “so I’m aware you don’t know anything. Your job is to observe and then type the words I tell you to type into that tablet there. We’ve got a team complaining about dungeon crashers at an E-ranked gate. Two people on this is overkill, but we always do fieldwork in pairs. Enforcement is easier with an extra witness present.”

  I listened.

  “You’re allowed to ask questions if we’re in the car.”

  “What do we do if there are actually dungeon crashers?” I asked.

  “Unless we have special orders that say otherwise, we take the report, set up surveillance for when the crashers exit if they haven’t already, and pass everything off to the investigation department.”

  “I thought crashers got arrested.”

  “They do,” McDouglas answered, “but not by us and not right now. Trying to arrest a whole crawl team at the same time is like shaking a bees' nest before you try to remove it. Our report will help the investigation team ID them, and then they’ll get arrested one at a time. No big battles or showdowns.”

  That was less exciting than the television shows made enforcement out to be, but it also made sense. A fully armed party riding high on combat adrenaline could do a lot of damage before they went down. Yanking them out of bed at 3 a.m. was far safer.

  “The majority of fieldwork is deescalation and paperwork about the deescalation,” he continued. “If you’re dealing with a crawler, assume they’re pissed before you even get there. In this case, these guys reserved a gate, geared up, and stepped inside to find someone was already clearing it. That’s pretty frustrating.”

  Yeah, I would be frustrated by that experience too.

  We drove south of Pittsburgh for a little more than thirty minutes and pulled onto the shoulder of a semi-rural highway. We weren’t far from the dense sprawl of the city, but we were far enough that there were patches of farm and wilderness all around.

  We joined four pickup trucks and two cars parked on the side of the road, all with crawler passes in their windows. I couldn’t see the dungeon gate from there, which wasn’t unusual. This part of the state had a good number of hills, gullies, and hollows, so gates being out of sight was common.

  I only counted four people, and as if anticipating my question, McDouglas said, “Most of a team will just go to sleep when this kind of thing happens. Always assume there are people in the cars until you’ve confirmed otherwise with your own eyes.”

  McDouglas tossed me a lanyard with a badge and got out of the car, putting his own on as he went.

  When I reached to grab my kit from the backseat, he chuckled. “Don’t bother.”

  Two of the crawlers wore old platemail, another had a mismatched set of leathers and chainmail, and the fourth wore a pair of camouflage utility pants and a matching light jacket. Military surplus, I guessed.

  The guys in plate were probably fighters or a similar martial class. The one in leathers might be a rogue or a ranger, and the one in camo was likely a caster of some sort. The system penalized casters for wearing armor, so most relied on their party and protective spells to avoid harm. Higher-level casters used enchantments for additional protections, but anyone running E-ranked gates couldn't afford gear like that.

  One of the scruffy guys in plate spit a brown glob into the tall grass and stepped forward to greet us.

  “I’m the party captain,” he said, holding up his crawler license to prove his identity. “Whole first fifty yards of the gate was cleared when we got here. Turned back and called you folks.”

  “How long ago was this?” McDouglas asked, flipping open a small pad to take notes.

  “Hour and a half or something like it.”

  “See anyone go in or out?”

  The crawler snapped a can of snuff closed and tucked the wad into his lip. “Nope.”

  “What kind of dungeon is it?”

  “Looks like a vermin dungeon to me. Bunch of big-ass rats.”

  McDouglas nodded and asked, “Ever have someone crash your gate before? If not, I can walk you through your options.”

  “This is a first for us.”

  “For an E-ranked gate, your two choices are to walk away or to go into the gate anyway to ensure the gate gets closed. If you walk away, you’ll get credit equal to what you paid for this gate to put toward your next run. If you choose to close the gate, we’ll return 100% of the dungeon fee and give you a 25% credit toward your next gate of the same rank.”

  “We still keep the loot if we get our money back?”

  “Yep. Sometimes you luck out and the crashers didn’t get very far, so your profit ends up being pretty good. Also a chance for the opposite, of course.”

  The lead crawler put a finger in his ear to scratch it. “Give me a minute to check with my guys.”

  As he stepped away to rejoin his party, McDouglas spoke softly, “We want them to take option two to get the gate closed for sure, but we also can’t promise them any specific returns, so I try to play up the best-case scenario a little bit while still being honest.”

  “Do crawlers ever fake crash reports to get that deal?”

  “Probably,” he admitted. “You can’t get away with more than one or two, though. Our record system will flag any anomalies for investigation, so if one team is submitting above-average crash reports, we’ll know about it. These guys will take the deal, by the way.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Rednecks love to gamble, and anyone reserving an E-ranked gate is usually not in a position to pass up a potential payday.”

  The lead crawler came back. “We’ll make sure it’s cleared.”

  “Excellent,” McDouglas said and pulled the tablet from my hands. He flicked through a few menus. “Need your signature. This says you agree to close the gate and that you know it’s a crime to attack or attempt to apprehend crashers. Only self-defense is permitted. Otherwise, let them leave.”

  Not bothering to read anything, the crawler used his finger to sign and handed the tablet back.

  “Thank you, crawler. One last question: what kind of beer do you prefer?”

  “We’re Yuengling men, through and through.”

  McDouglas nodded. “Alright, please wait one more moment.”

  He passed the tablet to me and went back to the SUV. I heard the back hatch slam, and McDouglas returned, setting a case of Yuengling on the tailgate of one of the crawler trucks.

  “What’s this?” the lead crawler asked.

  “You guys are doing me a big favor by closing this. Unless you don’t want the beer, I can-”

  “You can leave it right there,” the lead crawler laughed. “What’d you say your name was?”

  “McDouglas.”

  The lead crawler shook his hand. “Appreciate a classy fella. Thank you very much.”

  “Keep your heads in there.” To me, he said, “Go to the car and start logging the report. I’ll set up the trail cam.”

  McDouglas joined me a few moments later. We wouldn’t be responsible for retrieving the trail cam, but we would get a copy of the images and footage it recorded.

  “Beer isn’t part of CDM policy, and a good few of my colleagues would disagree with that move,” he said, checking his phone before we pulled away. “My advice? Make crawlers your allies. You’ll see a lot of the same faces on this job, and everything about your life will be easier if even one crawler on the scene likes you a little bit.”

  “And you happened to have a case of Yuengling?”

  McDouglas laughed. “I’ve got four brands in the back, two cases each. Like I said, this is an off-book decision that is technically a violation of our ethics policy. I don’t see it as bribery, but I’m not the one who brings down the hammer, you know?”

  “Understood. What usually happens if crawlers find crashers in a dungeon?”

  “That’s pretty rare. Crashers know if we get an image of their faces, that’s it. AI facial recognition is too damn good. Your average crasher will hit the beginning of a dungeon like they did here. They get in, get some XP and a few drops, and then they get out–all before we ever show up.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Good. Now get all of that interaction logged.”

  McDouglas turned up a classic rock radio station and didn’t say another word to me the whole way back to headquarters.