“What do we know about security?” Saito said when Megan and I got to our desks. “What do they expect us to do? Clipboard them to death?”

  Intern Enforcer Lofold stood nearby, but he was on his phone speaking to what sounded like family members in need of reassurance. The already narrow aisles of the Enforcer floor were cluttered with swords and shields. Chief Director Akinwale said to be ready to respond to a surge. Having to run out to your car first didn’t count as ready.

  Megan shrugged. “I’m not taking a bullet for a dungeon gate, that’s for sure.”

  “Hell no,” Saito agreed.

  “I don’t see them sending interns to guard a high-ranked gate,” I began, but as the words left my mouth, I remembered that just last night I ran a D gate at level 2. Maybe a security detail was more likely than I wanted to admit.

  “Listen up,” Grensmith yelled, addressing the whole floor of CDM enforcers.

  Everyone quieted.

  “The online portal for licensed crawlers is officially offline,” he said. “To prevent more blockades, we are going back to pre-internet procedures for assigning gate rights. Only a few of us will have access to the actual database. Instead, each of you will be assigned a batch of gates. Crawlers will call in, request a gate rank, commit to a gate fee, and then be directed to the appropriate enforcer for the specifics.

  “Gate ranks and locations are officially considered classified. You are not to share the details of your gates with anyone but the individuals who have purchased gate rights. That includes your coworkers, friends, and family. We know who was assigned what gates, so if a blockade appears at a gate in your folder, you will be one of the first stops for the investigation team.

  “For those of you looking around and thinking that this is way too many people for the number of gates we administer, you’re right. We are covering gate assignments for the entire state. There’s an A gate in Newark under a blockade, so the Philadelphia office is bracing for a surge, and the smaller offices have their own assignments.

  “Anyone who is over level 5, join me in the conference room. Everyone else, wait at your desks for your assigned gates.”

  After a fresh wave of office chaos, I received my folder. I wasn’t allowed to formally confirm it, but I got the sense that the interns got all the E gates and a few Ds. Where the crawler portal used an auction format to sell rights, we were offering a first-come, first-served flat rate. The CDM would lose a ton of money on this, but with how often phones rang, crawlers seemed to be aware that this was a business opportunity.

  The most important objective was to close gates. This format incentivized crawlers to be more active than they might usually be due to the limited-time nature of the situation. At the same time, busy crawlers inside dungeons were less likely to annihilate a whole mess of level 1s blocking access to a gate somewhere else.

  After four hours or so, the frequency of calls finally began to quiet. Megan and Saito hoped an end was in sight, but their hopes were misplaced. We were each handed lists of seasoned licensed crawlers and told to start dialing to offer gate rights directly at discounted rates. I doubted that was necessary for the more profitable gates, but I also wasn’t allowed to ask.

  I dialed the first name on my sheet.

  I looked up, and it was midnight. A few people slept at their desks, and several curled up in the comfier chairs of the enforcer lobby. I was jealous I hadn’t gotten a break that was long enough for even a small nap.

  Megan elbowed me at one point. I had fallen asleep after all.

  She showed me her phone. “Can you believe this?”

  Rubbing my eyes, I squinted to parse what I was seeing on the screen. At that moment, the footage was a lot of shaking and bouncing, like the streamer was running–or fleeing.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Masked crawlers attacked the gate in Newark and two gates in North Carolina. This is a North Carolina stream. Police tried to stop them.”

  I knew she chose the word “tried” deliberately. Pepper spray and service pistols weren’t useful against high-level crawlers, so any effort the police made was a pointless gesture at best. Maybe they hoped the prospect of killing someone with a badge would be a deterrent for crawlers. It wasn’t.

  Megan sighed. “This sets a bad precedent.”

  “Solves the problem, though,” Saito said without turning around. “Can’t have a blockade without the campers.”

  “That’s terrible,” Megan replied.

  “I didn’t say it was right.”

  “If crawlers are above the law, everything falls apart.”

  Saito spun for a second. “They’re already above the law. They just don’t have to act like it most of the time.”

  She waved Saito off. “Okay, okay. You’re right.”

  The footage was useless, so I checked updates on my own phone. The first attack in North Carolina was already over. Well, the attack itself probably only lasted a second or two, but the scene had calmed enough that surveying it was possible again.

  Seventeen casualties, all dead from Bolt spells. The area around the gate was churned, cratered soil littered with corpses. Smoke wafted off of several of them. The bodies that weren’t charred had the fern-like fractal patterns common to lightning strike victims. Those lines were black, and the tissue around them was blue and purple from all of the ruptured vessels beneath.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Two more alerts came through back-to-back. A masked group of crawlers attacked campers in Montana, and another attacked in Nevada.

  “Holy shit,” Intern Enforcer Wilson gasped.

  She was looking at her phone, so I guessed she had just read the same notifications I did.

  Before any of us could comment, one of the full-time enforcers shouted, “the Butler blockade is down!”

  The office cheered, but it was subdued and halfhearted given the hour.

  “Does that mean we can leave soon?” Megan asked.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Saito answered.

  “The other blockades are starting to come down too,” she said. “Probably afraid their gate is next on the hit list.”

  That seemed logical to me. If I were one of the campers, I would have done the same math and decided to quit. From what I was reading, the gates that got hit never had the chance to surrender. They might not have even seen their deaths coming.

  My phone vibrated.

  “Are you okay?” Beth asked.

  I told her I was fine and not to worry about me. I was in the office and not in the field.

  An hour later, Grensmith knocked on my desk to wake me up. Megan needed an extra knock before she stirred.

  “We’re done for the night,” he said. “All the blockades are down. See you for your shift-” he made a show of checking the time on his phone. “-later today. Go get some sleep.”

  Megan still hadn’t opened her eyes, but her head was up. “That’s it? It’s over?”

  Grensmith laughed. “Nope, but it’s changed, and for the worse. Vigilante crawlers? This is going to tie us up for years.”

  “At least there are no imminent surges,” Saito mumbled.

  Shaking his head at Saito, Grensmith said, “High-level system creations killed normal people, and so far we have no idea who they are or where they went. Those creations are crawlers, but that still sounds an awful lot like a surge to me.”

  Saito dropped his head.

  Grensmith nodded. “Yep. See you soon.”

  The dungeon gate portal was back online but bereft of inventory. Every gate was scheduled to be cleared. And gunmen weren’t threatening to let a B-ranked gate surge in our backyard.

  We quietly collected our things and followed the growing stream of CDM employees heading out of the building. Megan stopped a few feet from the door. She seemed to think. She checked her phone and thought some more.

  “I’m just sleeping here,” she said and spun on her heel.

  When I got to my car, I considered doing the same.

  I could smell the squid dungeon even before I opened the door, and I was afraid to experience what happened when I did. But my bed wasn’t far.

  My couch, I mean. Beth was still using my room.

  When my alarm went off for my Monday morning start, my head throbbed and my eyes hurt. My poor sleep habits caught up with me a while ago, but the emergency shift to deal with the blockades made the exhaustion exponentially worse. As I rallied the strength to get up, I made the classic mistake of checking the news before ever lifting my head from my pillow.

  Seven CDM employees in total had died in the crawler attacks. None were in Pennsylvania, but it was hard not to feel like that could have been me. I wouldn’t have stood a chance either if I were assigned to one of those sites.

  I also realized Grensmith was right. The immediate problem was no longer an issue, but this was far from over.

  Beth must have heard my phone. She came out of my room and didn’t wait for me to finish sitting up before hugging me.

  “I told you. I’m fine.”

  “So?” Beth asked, her voice muffled by my t-shirt.

  This was nice. I considered Nathan my family, but a hug from my little sister gave me a different kind of peace. I hadn’t realized how much I could miss something as small as a hug.

  “I have to get ready for work,” I said. “Thank you for worrying about me.”

  “They’re not even giving you a day to recover?”

  “Dungeon gates don’t care about work-life balance.”

  “Still. See you tonight?” she asked. “Or do you think you’ll get called in for a gate?”

  “I’m pretty sure we sold every single open gate in the state yesterday. I doubt there will be any surge risks for at least the next few days.”

  “Okay, good. I’ll get to see you for a few hours before my shift.”

  “I hope so. Don’t bank on me getting out at a normal hour, though, okay? Don’t schedule your day around me.”

  Beth nodded.

  A few minutes later, she handed me a cup of tea on my way to the door.

  “Aw, thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

  She shrugged and hugged me again.

  My email pinged every few seconds on my entire drive to work. They all looked like gate details and related supplemental information, but I wasn’t sure why I was receiving them.

  Grensmith solved that mystery shortly after I sat at my desk. In response to the deaths of CDM employees at the hands of crawlers, the agency was coming down hard on all crawlers. For the indefinite future, we were stepping up enforcement to an extreme.

  Normally, we wouldn’t send someone to a rural gate to confirm if the crawlers hung their crawler parking permits from their rearview mirrors correctly, but we were instructed to write citations for every and any violation we found.

  Did they park far enough from the road? Did they park in an appropriate place? Were their vehicle inspections and registrations up to date? Were all of their weapons properly secured, or did they leave a shortsword in their back seat? Did they litter near or around the gate, even a single cigarette butt?

  We weren’t likely to encounter crawlers because they would be running the dungeon when we arrived, but if we did, we were instructed to inform them that the CDM was looking for leads on the masked crawlers, and we would be relentless with inspections until they were identified.

  Megan and I were paired together. While I liked the idea of unsupervised fieldwork, directing us to lightly threaten crawlers made me wish Chapman or Grensmith would be looking over my shoulder. When they were present, my being forced to do these things for my job was more obvious to the crawlers.

  I would have also been fine with Enforcer McDouglas, but he was deployed somewhere else in the state, apparently.

  As we walked to the car, Megan said, “You look frustrated.”

  “Once upon a time, I thought the CDM would be a great way to network in the crawling industry.”

  She laughed. “Is there a term for the opposite of networking?”

  “Rampant self-sabotage, maybe?”

  “At least we only have E gates,” she added. “I would not want to be writing parking tickets to crawlers running C and B gates.”

  Megan had a point. I would not want to do that either and was thankful I wasn’t.

  But if I stuck with the CDM for my career, I would have to do it someday.

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