“Good first day?” Nathan asked.

  A little milk dribbled down his chin when he stuffed a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. He went to college for sociology but now worked for an HVAC company. He was a little softer than he was when we were freshmen, but he was still reasonably athletic.

  “Was in the field for an hour, which was kind of cool,” I answered. “But mostly I did trainings at my desk.”

  “When do you start doing crawls?”

  I shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know how that works.”

  “Are you deep enough to tell me what the government is hiding from us?”

  “There are at least fifty active gates at any given time in our jurisdiction. I didn’t think the number was that high, but I also don’t think that’s a secret. They haven't shown me the freezer with the aliens yet.”

  Nathan chewed and swallowed. “Fifty? No wonder they’re so shit at securing them.”

  “It’s very obvious we don’t have the staff to handle it. I’m surprised they do as well as they do, to be honest.”

  “Yeah. It’s a wonder this country still exists. Ah, bad news, I saw the stomp sisters leading a frat boy with a keg up the stairs.”

  I groaned. The stomp sisters lived above us, and they were endlessly noisy. When they hosted a party, the whole building seemed to shake. I needed earplugs and melatonin to get any measure of sleep in those cases.

  Nathan and I moved into this apartment as sophomores because the Southside of Pittsburgh was popular with college kids. Carson Street was loaded with bars, and this part of the city was known for being the party neighborhood, so it attracted visitors from all over.

  Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were like mini war zones.

  Parking turned into a lawless free-for-all, the streets were jammed with traffic, drunks yelled at all times of the night, and then there were the fights. A shooting or two each weekend was expected, as were two or three system fights, which meant that at least one party involved triggered one of their system-earned abilities in the scuffle.

  At a minimum, that was equivalent to pulling a firearm in the eyes of the law, but that didn’t stop mages from throwing fireballs through storefront windows or barbarians from fighting every bouncer a club had, simultaneously.

  All of that was great as undergrads. Now? Not so much.

  We wanted to move, but we couldn’t afford anything else. In fact, we wouldn’t be able to afford the apartment we had if it wasn’t rent controlled. The prices they charged now for the same-size unit were absurdly high, and people paid it.

  I pulled a cold hotdog out of a pack in the fridge and sat at the table to sift through my mail. Utility bills. Student loan payments. Donation solicitations from my alma mater. Three promises of preapproval for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  And then one envelope hand-addressed in a style I recognized.

  Nathan saw me frown at it. “Sorry, man. I had a feeling that wasn’t good news.”

  “I thought ignoring texts and calls would be enough,” I said.

  “If they start showing up here, I’m not dealing with them. Your mom scares the shit out of me.”

  “I don’t think it will come to that if it hasn’t by now. At least I hope it won’t.”

  I skimmed the letter. It was the usual plea to atone for my sins and to join the side of righteousness in the fight against Satan’s invasion:

  You know in your heart that you walk through the valley of the shadow of death. You’ve seen the light, and it will welcome you back.

  For a while, she had tried guilt, sending me texts with messages like:

  Gram is getting older. If you don’t come home for Christmas this year, you might miss her last Christmas.

  That one they had used for the last six years. Gram was powered by a potent combination of hate and spite. She would never die.

  I had a few professors who were old enough to remember the pre-dungeon world, and they said that religion was a lot different then. Still plenty of extremists and such, but the dungeons galvanized an upswing in intensity to the point that the religious and secular could barely coexist. In some places, that meant another source of conflict for governments to manage.

  Fortunately, our city wasn’t a hotbed for that kind of activity. Ohio, West Virginia, and the middle of the state had a number of church communities. My old church was in West Virginia, by the way.

  I crumpled the letter and tossed it into the garbage can. I missed.

  Nathan chuckled as I went across the room to pick it up.

  “We’ve got 2 episodes of The Wilds: Alaska to watch,” he said. “The dire bear cliffhanger has been killing me.”

  “I can do one, and then I need to get some sleep. I’m beat.”

  “One could argue that watching The Wilds: Alaska is a professional obligation, given your new job.”

  I shook my head. “The CDM isn’t involved with anything outside the state, and you won’t see me signing up to run the wilds. I don’t know that I’d want to go to Alaska even if it wasn’t overrun.”

  “You got me there, bro. It’s crazy to me that people ever lived there.”

  “One episode. Then I’m going to bed.”

  ***

  As was common for reality television, the dire bear cliffhanger was a red herring. Frost trolls attacking the camp in the night, however, was not. Two of four cameramen were killed, as were three of the twelve hunters. Everyone on the show, even the cameramen, was over level 20, a height that only a small fraction of crawlers ever reached.

  Me? I’d be lucky to get enough dungeon time to hit level 10.

  Level-10s made decent money, to be clear, but they were grade schoolers compared to level-20s. A level 10 mage could blow through a door with a fireball. A level 20 mage could blow up the whole house.

  And they still barely survived in the extreme north of the wilds. If monsters could ever coordinate a proper army, Canada and the United States wouldn’t stand a chance. Thankfully, no monsters showed that level of intelligence. A tribe of trolls or bugbears might attack as a unit, but a few skirmishes now and then at the border were easy to overwhelm with firepower.

  The real danger of the wilds was their unpredictability.

  Dungeons had measurable ranks, making it easier for crawlers to know if they could or could not survive a particular instance. In the wilds, you weren’t as likely to encounter low-level enemies because the stronger monsters ate all of them. Any monster strong enough to eat a low-level monster could eat a low-level person just fine. The right boss or mini boss could consume entire towns.

  One episode turned into three, and I didn’t get enough sleep. I was determined to make this career work for me, so I had four alarms set to make sure I got to work on time.

  I beat three of the interns to the cubicle the next morning, including Megan. The other two already at their desks had their headphones on, and their eyes never left their screens when I shuffled by. I was offended at first, but then I found myself barely managing a wave when Megan sat down. I had so many modules to slog through that I couldn’t bear to waste a few seconds on small talk.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Before I knew it, a finger tapped me on the shoulder.

  “There’s a Pamela’s around the corner,” Megan said. “We’re going to grab a quick lunch. Want to come?”

  I looked at the time. How had I been working for five hours already?

  “Yeah, I’ll go.”

  The interns Amanda Leminson and Tom Saito joined us. Leminson had the bulky strength of a softball pitcher, and Saito could maybe weigh one hundred pounds if he chugged a bunch of water. I had Megan pegged for a volleyball player, but no, she played soccer up through her junior year of college.

  Maybe not surprisingly, dungeon jobs attracted a fair amount of jocks. I had played soccer when I was younger and then a ton of intramural racquetball in college. For some reason, my dorm was obsessed with racquetball, so I got sucked into it too.

  And I haven’t thought about racquetball since, actually. Writing about it now is the first time it’s come to mind in years and years. How was racquetball so popular in college but ceased to exist as soon as I graduated? I never heard about any adult casually playing racquetball. There were probably rec leagues somewhere, but it wasn’t like hockey or soccer or football, where casual interest continued on beyond undergrad.

  At any rate, I ordered a tuna melt and listened to the other interns gossip.

  Internships lasted six months in the enforcement department, and they weren’t hired as cohorts. Each of us was on a different month. Leminson was on her sixth, Saito was on his fourth, and Megan was on her second. The idea was to give a first-month intern like me visibility into every level of the process, piece by piece.

  Megan said that’s not how it really worked out. She was already doing the work a six-month intern was expected to do because there were never enough bodies for the volume that came through.

  “Where are you hoping to get placed?” I asked Leminson.

  “Anything with fieldwork. Once I hit level 10, I’m multiclassing and going independent.”

  “You can afford that?”

  You couldn’t choose the class you were born with, but you could choose your multiclass. For the average person, the cost of multiclassing put it out of reach. It required a prohibitively high number of refined mana crystals, which were processed monster drops, equivalent to a year of running C-ranked gates.

  “I’ve been saving since I was a kid,” she answered.

  “That’s also why she only ordered grilled cheese and will make a play for your leftovers,” Saito said, grinning.

  “The money I’ll make after will make up for it.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what build are you aiming for?” I asked.

  “Spellsword. I was born with fighter, and I’ll multiclass into black mage. Pure fighters tend to hit a ceiling as crawlers. The rare abilities make it possible for you to push over level 15, but I’ve never gotten lucky with anything. Mage is the surefire way to be sure I can get to 20.”

  “She dreams big,” Megan added. I got the sense she was less optimistic about Leminson’s future.

  With a mouthful of grilled cheese, Leminson asked me, “What class are you?”

  “Archer. What about you guys?”

  “Brawler,” Megan answered.

  With a sigh, Tom said, “Monk.”

  It wasn’t surprising that we were all martial classes. Magic users got snatched up for prep and apprentice programs. They were so valuable that recruitment essentially started at birth.

  Martial classes were far more common, so pretty much every normal working person had one. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Tarvoski, had the barbarian class, and she was the sweetest person I’ve ever met. The guy who filed my taxes was a defender. That class specialized in shield work.

  Monk was one of the hardest classes to train, however. The few weapons the class permitted, like bo staffs and tonfas, were useless against many common monsters. A sword could be enchanted to slice rock, so a fighter could always make use of their weapon. Monks, however, were not permitted to wield enchanted weapons.

  And then there were the armor penalties.

  Grinding monk levels eventually unlocked exceptional abilities, but getting to those heights was precarious with all of the class restrictions. Tom would find it difficult to ever do fieldwork for the CDM, but that was only a fraction of the organization. The bulk of the employees working there never went beyond level 1. His life wasn’t over because he drew a crappy class, but his options were more limited.

  Archers, brawlers, and fighters had it far easier than monks.

  “How was the ride-along with McDouglas?” Megan asked.

  “Short,” I answered. “We spent more time driving than anything else.”

  “That’s most calls,” Saito said. “And all long calls are bad calls. Best to hope for short.”

  I nodded. “Fair.”

  Megan rolled her eyes at Saito. “It’s not that grim. McDouglas isn’t the worst enforcer to shadow for a run, either. Chapman and Grensmith are the hard ones.”

  “What makes them hard?”

  “To some people, teaching interns is just a part of the job. Something that has to be done. Then there are enforcers who treat interns like robots. They probably got shit on when they were new, so now they shit on us. Tons of grunt work. Absurd sticklers. I once got a twenty-minute lecture because I failed to italicize the period at the end of an italicized sentence. They basically just make everything harder than it needs to be.”

  Leminson and Saito nodded along as Megan spoke.

  “Six months go quick,” Leminson added. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Is this your first pick for a career?” Saito asked.

  I shook my head. “I tried to be an English teacher.”

  Megan lit up. “I tried to do elementary ed! Can barely live on teacher money, right?”

  “Yep.”

  Megan pointed a fork at Leminson. “She majored in anthropology. Wanted to be an archaeologist.” She turned the fork to Saito. “He was an art major.”

  They both shrugged.

  None of these stories were surprising. I didn’t know a single person who worked in the field they majored in. Not one. And no, I didn’t know any teachers. I never got that far. I spent sophomore through senior year expecting teacher salaries to rebound. They didn’t, so I threw a resume at a CDM posting when I graduated.

  Internships with the CDM weren’t that competitive. Crawlers made good money. CDM employees did not. An internship with a guild or a crawl team–now those were competitive. I didn’t even get a rejection from most of them. I submitted my application, and that was it.

  I did get the hint, of course.

  “I’d like to join a guild or a team eventually,” I said. “If my degree is useless, at least I have the chance to retire early as a crawler.”

  The three interns eating with me looked at each other but didn’t say anything.

  “What?”

  “I just went through this,” Leminson said. “The reputable guilds all grow their members from level 1. I couldn’t figure out why I never got anywhere with my applications, and finally one of the admin staff at a guild broke the news to me. They see the quality of our training as inferior, basically.”

  “I know it’s competitive,” I replied.

  “No, that’s not what I’m describing. A competition means you have a chance to win, even if it’s small. If your application has CDM on it, the software rejects you immediately. A human won’t ever see it. I’m not out to crush your dreams or anything, but I wish someone had explained that to me when it was my first week on the job, so that’s why I’m telling you. I’m going independent because of that.”

  Saito offered me a sympathetic frown. “There are a few independent teams out there. The money and XP aren’t awesome, but you can make a living on E-ranked gates if you really have to. Could get lucky and pick up a D-ranked or two sometimes.”

  Independent teams were capped on their profit potential. Guilds had full-time harvesters in-house to milk gates for all they were worth, collecting monster parts, mining ores, recovering artwork, and pushing media campaigns. Not only did they extract every speck that could be sold, but they also built members into celebrities so that footage of crawls themselves could be monetized.

  Nearly everyone recorded dungeon runs. Some did it for training and liability purposes, but most tried to use it for social content in some manner. Mounting a GoPro to a helmet was simple enough, so YouTube was flooded with crawl videos. Most saw no more than a few hundred views, but some crawlers made more on the footage of a run than they did on the run itself.

  Livestreaming dungeon runs was growing in popularity, but presently, only large guilds could afford the hardware it took to get a signal out of a dungeon gate.

  Guilds were not the same as crawl teams, to be clear.

  Crawl teams could be as large as guilds and chased all the same profit sources, but they contracted out for everything but crawlers. Some people argued savvy teams made more money than guilds because they could better control expenses. If a person wasn’t needed for the job, they didn’t have to pay them to sit around and wait for work to come in. If a guild didn’t need a mining team for a week, they still had to pay theirs.

  Independent teams could rarely afford the upfront costs of all that infrastructure, so bidding for and harvesting B, A, and S-ranked gates was typically out of reach. C and D gates were harder to come by, but not impossible.

  I wanted guild or crawl team money. Surely the actual market wasn’t as bleak as they believed. I didn’t argue with them, though.

  “I’ve got time to figure it out,” I said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief when Saito changed the topic to complain about the train always being late in the mornings. Leminson was obviously sensitive about her dreams of guilds and teams getting dashed, and I didn’t want to rub any salt in her wounds by talking more about my own goals. I was going to make it where she didn’t, however. I didn’t care how hard it was.

  Looking back on it, I’m not sure if I was optimistic or naive. Or perhaps those two ideas are one and the same?