The D gate was an iron door on an old basketball court in North Oakland. Both backboards were missing, and weed-filled cracks threaded through the pavement.

  I was the fourth to arrive, and I didn’t recognize the captain or the guard. They were maybe a few years older than me, far from the grizzled veterans I was used to seeing on culls. The captain had a massive tower shield and a longsword, which made me think he had the defender class. I had never done a run with a defender before, but I liked the idea of someone specializing in protecting their party joining me on my first D gate.

  The guard had a longsword and a standard-issue round shield. He was probably a fighter, but that was tough to say.

  The third person at the gate was a linebacker-looking barbarian. His battle-axe looked impractically large.

  Nobody had duct tape, so I dared to hope this wasn’t a Roach Run.

  “Name?” the captain asked as I approached.

  “Gray. Sorry, I mean Carmino.”

  After a strange look, he went back to his phone and scrolled for a few flicks. “You’re level 2?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He sighed and rubbed his head. “I guess they figure an archer will be a little bit safer, but damn, dude. You run a D gate before?”

  I shook my head.

  “They must be really hard-up for cullers. Geez. Stay in the back row, okay? No hero shit.”

  “Understood.”

  A brawler and a fighter joined the party twenty minutes later.

  At low levels, there wasn’t much of a difference between brawler and fighter. The way the build guides described it, a brawler thrived on mayhem, and a fighter thrived on order. The brawler class got bonuses for fighting multiple enemies with some of their abilities specific to being surrounded or outnumbered. Fighters, meanwhile, prioritized precision and calculated tactics.

  At low levels, they both hit stuff.

  “Alright,” the captain said after another unhappy scroll through his phone. “This is a D-ranked gate. Guard and I are level 9 and have run up through C gates. Fighter, brawler, and barbarian are level 4. Archer is level 2.”

  Everyone looked at me.

  “Cull teams usually want level 5s for D gates, so we’re running this a bit lopsided. This is a serious run, not an easy XP E gate. Everyone needs to be on top of their game and follow calls. Got me?”

  We all nodded.

  “I took a peek inside when I got here,” he continued. “This looks like a squid dungeon, so we’re going to see inkers, beakers, and slimes.”

  Inkers resembled octopuses, and beakers resembled squids, but they weren’t water creatures. Both got around just fine on land and could climb walls and ceilings. Inkers sprayed black ink to slow and blind targets before they beat them to death with their tentacles. Beakers preferred to jump and wrap their prey before biting them. Both could grow to be the size of an inner tube you might see at the lake or on the river.

  Slimes were exactly what you expect. If you didn’t hit their core, a golf-ball-sized stone that functioned as their heart and brain, weapons didn’t harm them. Every stream or guide I read recommended leaning on casters for immobilizing slimes. Otherwise, hitting their core was a pain in the ass. The force of a strong strike could push the core away before you hit it, kind of like wind blowing a fly away if you try to hit it with a book.

  I was familiar with all of these monsters, but I had never seen them in person. I knew, however, that our party being all martial classes for this run wasn’t ideal.

  The captain said, “Archer, don’t waste arrows on slimes unless we make the call to. The rest of you, thrusts are your best chance at getting a hit on the core. Don’t bother with anything else if you can help it. If you get inked, don’t panic. Put your shield up and call that you’re blinded. Do not start swinging all over the place like an asshole.

  “If a beaker grabs you, peeling it off is pointless. If you can, smash it off the wall or the floor. If it gets your head, drop your sword, grab your knife, and stab it in the head. Try not to stab yourself in the face in the process.

  “Questions?”

  Nobody raised their hands.

  “If you have goggles, go get them,” the captain said as he fished a pair out of his pocket. The guard did the same.

  The rest of us only looked at each other. We didn’t have goggles, only safety glasses. I made a mental note to add a pair to my gear list. It occurred to me then that the spray from an inker would be easier to manage with a proper seal around my eyes. I wished the quartermasters provided extra gear like this or at least provided a list of recommended items to have on hand. If they did, I would have been properly prepared.

  The captain adjusted the fit for his goggles and said, “Alright. Game faces on, kids.”

  And we ventured into the gate.

  This was the most traditional dungeon I had ever been in. Instead of bare cave or plain brick, this gate felt like traveling through an actual castle. The ceilings were vaulted. The torches were mounted in sconces. The walls had decorative elements like partial columns and arches. Wooden doors split off from the main corridor, and I saw iron bars in the distance ahead.

  The dungeon had the thick mustiness of a flooded basement. Moss and mold climbed the walls, and something like pond slime covered every surface. Here and there, water seeped through the bricks and ran down the walls to form puddles.

  We had the space to walk four abreast, so the captain, the barbarian, the brawler, and the fighter formed the frontline. The guard and I made up the backline.

  The captain knocked on the first door to our right. He stepped back and pressed his back against the wall.

  A green puddle expanded out from beneath the door with a consistency and viscosity that reminded me of a jellyfish washed up on the beach. As soon as the core emerged, the captain stabbed it. In the dim light of torches, the core would have been easy to miss, even more so if we were in an active battle.

  A second slime squeezed through next, and it too was killed swiftly. I estimated each to be about the size of a pizza box.

  “Get the idea?” the captain whispered to the fighter.

  He nodded.

  “Get that door.”

  The fighter repeated the method the captain just demonstrated. He knocked, waited, stabbed, waited, and stabbed again. Those two cleared every door in this corridor with that method while the rest of us watched.

  At the iron gate, the hall split like a T. We could go left or right.

  Before the captain opened the gate, he instructed us to hold formation ten feet back. When the captain put his hand on the bars, the guard whispered, “Be ready.”

  Rusty iron screeched and strained as the gate swung open, clanking dully when it bounced off the wall.

  The captain listened for a few seconds. “Here they come.”

  As he rejoined the formation, I could hear a growing hiss. As it neared, the sounds became more distinct, like hundreds of wet towels slopping onto the floor over and over.

  “Focus on anything above shoulder level,” the guard said to me. “Please don’t shoot our people.”

  Brown, black, and gray tentacles turned the corner, and then the corridor was filled with inkers and beakers. The inkers had round heads, while the beakers had pointed heads. They scrambled across every surface, racing toward our party.

  “Fucking shoot,” the guard hissed.

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  Right.

  I drew and loosed. Drew and loosed. Drew and loosed.

  If I headshotted a goblin, it was dead for sure. With these monsters, what looked like a bullseye to me didn’t slow their advance in the slightest. But I kept firing.

  The captain sliced a beaker in half when it jumped at his face. The brawler and fighter raised their shields to block an ink spray. Inkers followed the black spray with heavy blows, so the crawlers braced for those at the same time. A few beakers leapt and climbed around my party’s shields, reaching for their heads.

  The barbarian tried to kill a beaker wrapping the brawler’s head and neck, but an inker blasted the barbarian instead. Then a different beaker attached to his leg and bit.

  “Fuck!” he yelped, still blinded.

  The guard grabbed the barbarian’s shoulder from behind and yanked him to the back row. He used the bottom of his shield to remove and squish the beaker with two deft slams.

  The remaining three crawlers in the frontline hacked and cleaved unendingly for several seconds. For a moment, the swinging felt like being on a Roach Run, everyone keeping their weapons moving simply because there was no other choice. I don’t know how much my arrows really helped, but I kept them coming.

  As abruptly as the chaos started, it stilled. Pieces of inkers and beakers were scattered as if they had exploded. Flesh, tentacles, and milky white mucus dripped from every surface. A few pieces still twitched, and the whole corridor stank like dead fish.

  “Will you need to learn that lesson a second time?” the captain asked the barbarian.

  The barbarian shook his head, embarrassed.

  “Good. If this is a standard squid dungeon, we shouldn’t get another bum rush like that until just before the boss chamber. From here, they should come in twos and fours accompanied by a couple slimes. There’s always a chance this is a variant, though, so don’t let an assumption drop your guard.”

  That first fight took me to level 3. I didn’t have the time to properly read my unlock options, but I had the forethought to check the build guide for dex archer before the run started. I dropped 1 point into strength and then 2 points into dexterity and closed my system.

  We turned right, and after several steps, the hallway bent again. The captain pushed another iron gate open. Instead of coming down the hall to attack us like the first big encounter, two beakers came through an open side door, one moving across the wall and the other across the ceiling. A green slime followed on the floor, and three more slimes followed suit, squeezing under the closed doors farther up the corridor.

  “Left!” the captain called.

  An inker emerged from a hole in the ceiling above the brawler, its body expanding like a bubble of snot. That particular appearance was something of a reality check for me. I knew in my heart of hearts that, were I in the brawler’s position, I wouldn’t have seen that inker until it was already a problem.

  I did my part and drew my bow.

  Where 7 dexterity made me smoother and more precise, 9 dexterity amplified those sensations while adding a distinct sense of speed. My movements felt like being in the zone in an FPS game. My bow went from shot to shot with the ease of guiding a mouse pointer across the screen.

  I imagined moving to 5 strength helped there a bit too, but I couldn’t really feel the difference there the way I could with dexterity.

  We had five more similar encounters before we hit the second rush the captain warned us about. The smaller battles were tiring enough that coming up to the second rush was worrisome to me. My arms burned, and the level 4s took big, gulping breaths.

  Prior to hitting the choke point for the second rush, the captain whispered that we should stop to rest and drink some water.

  “No talking, though,” he said softly. “There’s a whole other half of the dungeon that could hear us.” I assumed he meant the part of the dungeon we would have seen had we turned left at the T instead of right early in the run.

  After ten minutes of staring at the floor, we advanced to the second rush. While I felt more prepared for this one than the first, the party’s fatigue was evident.

  The barbarian got taken off his feet by a good bash from an inker and then got bit by a beaker. The fighter and the brawler also got bit by beakers–the fighter in the biceps and the brawler in the back of his neck.

  With my attention on anything above shoulder level, as I was instructed, I didn’t see two slimes slip beneath the frontline. They wrapped my right leg, anchoring it in place. Their bodies soaked through my pants, and my leg went numb.

  “Help!” I barked.

  The guard saw the goop encasing my leg and slid his sword down it like it was lamb meat at a gyro shop. Much of the slimes’ bodies remained attached to my body, but their cores were on the ground where the guard could safely stab them. I appreciated that said stabbing didn’t happen with the slimes on my leg.

  “Head up,” he said. “Shoot!”

  Right.

  I went back to shooting arrows at angry seafood.

  When the battle ended, the defender turned to me. “Grab your knife. Peel off as much of what’s left as you can. Leg numb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That will go away in a few hours. Rinse off with some water. Might spare yourself the rash.”

  Green slimes, thankfully, didn’t consume, eat, or melt their prey on contact. They drowned their victims and then slowly–very slowly–dissolved their corpses. Slimes in C-ranked gates and up were much nastier.

  We took another break while the captain prepped us for the boss room.

  Which was going to be my first boss fight ever. For some reason, I expected the captain or guard to go in and clear it like they did for E gates, but nope. My first boss was going to be D-ranked. Great.

  “There are two potential boss fights,” the captain began. “It’s either a giant slime or a giant inker. The strategy is going to be similar for both: I will stay with all of you and clear adds while the guard focuses the boss. If it’s the slime, you can hunker down by the door. If it’s the inker, you need to be ready to move. Listen for me to call it. You don’t want to get hit by one of those tentacles. Last thing: Archer, if it’s the slime, you focus the boss. If it’s the inker, focus adds.”

  “Got it.”

  “Any questions?” the captain asked the party.

  No one had any.

  “Alright. Don’t fuck up.”

  We half-jogged into the boss chamber to keep from getting pinned at the door.

  The room was like a grand medieval dining hall years after the castle fell in a siege. One table off to the side was intact, while the others were smashed to pieces. The benches and chairs were in similar condition and scattered about. The far side of the room had a small stage with more broken boards than whole, and tattered red and black banners hung from the vaulted ceiling alongside a few surviving chandeliers.

  An octopus with a head the size of a porta-john sat on the stage, its body a muddy black everywhere except for its yellow eyes and gray suckers.

  “Stay on me!” the captain called as the guard moved forward.

  The captain bounced his shield off the floor two times, and the air around him seemed to ripple. Inkers and beakers squeezed through holes and cracks all over the room, racing toward him.

  Ah, so that was the defender’s Taunt ability.

  The brawler triggered their Rapid Attack ability, and the barbarian activated Berserk.

  “Left!” the captain called.

  The party shuffled to the side as a giant tentacle came down, the wet smack cracking pavers on impact.

  The guard nearly removed the arm with one slice. Though it wasn’t cut clean through, that limb was now effectively useless.

  “Left!”

  We slid again. The fighter was distracted by a beaker chomping on his forearm and didn’t heed the call in time. The downward impact of the boss’s strike folded the fighter forward, crashing him face-first into the floor with a sickening crunch.

  That tentacle spasmed on the floor a second later, the guard’s chop having severed it completely.

  “Stay in formation!” the guard called. “Right!”

  We shifted again. When that tentacle crashed into the ground, the guard unleashed a battle cry. I didn’t see his attack, but I did see the giant inker stiffen straight for an instant, as though it had just been shocked. That had to be good news, I thought.

  But I had adds to kill. I reached back for my arrow and… nothing. I was out of arrows, yet again. I needed to get a handle on that.

  I drew my sword and stepped forward to attack.

  The captain smacked me with his shield, knocking me backward and onto the ground. “No way, level 2.”

  I got back to my feet and hung out in the back like an unflushed turd. I was so fucking embarrassed.

  Several seconds later, the room stilled. The boss and all the adds were dead.

  The captain moved immediately to aid the downed fighter. When the fighter groaned and rolled over, I was relieved to see he wasn’t dead. That hit had been hard, but the terrible way he crumpled made me fear for the worst.

  “That wasn’t great,” the fighter wheezed.

  The guard knelt. Mucus dripped off his armor.

  “Easy,” he said to the fighter. “Don’t get up.”

  The fighter nodded.

  “Anything serious?”

  “Uhh… Everything hurts, but I don’t think anything is broken.” He paused and seemed to run through a mental diagnostic list to confirm he wasn’t lying. “I’m sorry for this. I biffed that call.”

  “Give yourself a second to recover. We need a few minutes to loot anyhow.”

  As we gathered mana crystals, I asked the captain why he wanted me to focus adds for a squid boss but focus boss if we got the giant slime encounter instead. His answer: every arrow matters. I was more likely to hit a giant slime core than a bunch of small ones, so the best use of the arrows was to go for the boss in that case. For the giant squid, I could eliminate one add or barely scratch the boss with each arrow, so I was more productive on adds.

  That made sense to me. I filed that lesson away.

  The rest of the way out, I had to half-drag my numb leg. When I finally sat and shut my car door, I released a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding.

  Holy shit. D gates were intense. There was a time when I wished I had been born a fighter instead of an archer, but I have to say that I really enjoyed not getting hit and bit by every monster in the dungeon.

  I tipped my head back into the headrest and sat with my eyes closed for a minute.

  When I brought it forward again, I opened my system menu.

  I was level 4.

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