Megan had her shield and sword up, ready for the green balls of hate weaving through vehicles and trash to get to us. Most carried metal pipes or wooden clubs.

  Exposing myself was a risk, but I needed a better vantage point.

  I scrambled up the hood of a car and stood on the roof.

  “Maybe fifteen goblins,” I yelled. “Six are moving toward your left.”

  TailF3ther’s latest round of feedback echoed in my mind: I tended to lock my draw elbow where I needed it to be stable yet mobile. In correcting that, he told me to think about forming a straight line from my draw elbow, through my forearm and hand, then the bow, and finally my grip.

  If any of those pieces were out of alignment, my shot would be much less accurate.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  I took a goblin off its feet with a headshot, which, to be honest, still felt really fucking cool.

  Two streams of goblins were coming for us. I focused on the rightmost stream so Megan could keep her attention on the left.

  My arrows hit car doors and windshields more than I’d like to admit. This nest had a lot of cover, and my timing had to be perfect to catch a goblin passing from one car to another.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  I spotted movement in the corner of my eye. A goblin with a brick in its hand climbed on top of the camper nearest to Megan, readying a surprise attack.

  That trick almost got me killed in Daisytown. Never again.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  Megan unleashed a guttural war cry, and the air around her seemed to shift and shake. Brawlers could use Taunt too.

  She stepped back to give her right flank a bit more cover and thrust her sword through the nearest goblin. Shifting, she lashed out at the next monster. Her sword blurred as it unleashed four consecutive strikes in the time it took her to deliver her first thrust. She darted forward with inhuman speed, hit another goblin, and then another and another.

  In the guides I read, they called Megan’s brawler build “the Machine Gun.” In general, brawlers chose that build or a more traditional tank build, as many brawler abilities increased damage resistance and durability. The base brawler skill that everyone with that class had from the start was called Durable. It gave Megan a 20% bonus to damage resistance and a free point of constitution.

  I suspected Megan chose Machine Gun over tank because she was fairly small. Like a hockey goalkeeper, a tank had to fill the space they were meant to protect. That was simply easier if you were big.

  The Machine Gun build relied on two abilities at its core:

  Rapid Attack

  Class: Brawler

  Type: Ability

  Cooldown: 20 seconds

  Duration: Instant

  Unleash three strikes with blindingly quick speed. If you attack more than one target with Rapid Attack, you must succeed on a dexterity check to change targets. Add an additional strike to Rapid Attack for every 4 dexterity points, rounded down.

  Momentum

  Class: Brawler

  Type: Trait

  Cooldown: None

  Duration: Perpetual

  Gain a 5% boost to attack speed for every attack landed in rapid succession. Momentum expires if you fail to land an attack after 1 second.

  Rapid Attack juiced the speed bonus of Momentum pretty much instantly, hence her swift and violent fury.

  I supported her from my elevated position, but I needed to get closer to cover her as she advanced deeper.

  I hopped down. I activated Piercing Shot to kill two goblins charging me and jumped on top of another car. I slipped and bounced my head off the windshield as I fell. The impact rippled through my still-healing nose, triggering a blossom of pain in my face.

  Blinking through the water that filled my eyes, I recovered my footing and tried the climb again, actually making it that time.

  Running swiftly, a goblin three times the size of a grunt wove through the maze of obstacles with a metal pipe raised over his head. His angle of approach put him on a path to flank Megan.

  “Berserker!” I yelled. “Fall back!”

  Megan ripped her sword out of a goblin’s chest and retreated toward me. “Where?!”

  “Ten o’clock! Hold there.”

  She slid to a stop between two SUVs. The goblins she had fought before pursued her, and she went to work chopping them up.

  “Focus the berserker!” she called.

  So I did.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  I unleashed arrow after arrow. Several glanced off the old cars, but just as many hit. He had two arrows in his head and three in his shoulder by the time he reached Megan, never so much as stumbling from my attacks.

  The goblin’s pipe on Megan’s shield sounded like a hammer on metal. She blocked two more, the attacks coming too quickly for her to launch a counterattack.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  Elbow. Straight Line.

  The sound of the pipe hitting Megan’s shield rang out again and again.

  The green bastard was a living pincushion, its Berserk ability masking the pain and the damage. When Berserk ended, he would be fucked, but I didn’t know how long that would take.

  So I kept shooting.

  One of my arrows punched through the goblin’s eye, throwing its head backward as it cried out in pain.

  That was the delay Megan needed. She triggered Rapid Attack and ripped open the Berserker’s chest with a fury of strikes that grew faster and faster.

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  A hand grabbed my ankle, but movement to my right caught my eye at the same time. I looked over in time to see a stone sailing toward me. If the goblin beneath me with a tire iron had waited another second, I would have taken that rock to my chest. Instead, I held my ground, ducked the rock swiftly with my enhanced dexterity, and shot an arrow straight down into the goblin’s skull.

  With a quick swivel, I sniped the goblin who had thrown the rock.

  Back to Megan. The berserker was down. She killed two more goblins who had aimed to attack her from behind while the berserker distracted her.

  “Got eyes?!” Megan yelled, searching her surroundings for more enemies.

  “I don’t see any.”

  Megan climbed onto the roof of a car near her and helped me search. “Me neither,” she declared a short time later.

  When I went to climb down, my one foot felt heavy. Ah. The goblin died but didn’t let go of my ankle. I kicked my own shin a few times to shake it loose.

  We joined back up, and I switched to my sword to help Megan search for any goblins that might have hidden. Twenty minutes later, we were reasonably certain we had killed them all. The only interesting discovery was a bunch of used needles, bent spoons, and broken vials around the campfire. No, the goblins weren’t shooting up. Whoever squatted here before was.

  Megan and I gave each other a thumbs up to say we were good.

  Megan took off her helmet. Her hair was soaked with sweat and hugged her skull. Her face was red, but her breathing had mostly recovered during our search.

  “Look at that, I earned a whole XP point,” she grumbled.

  I checked my own XP:

  XP Progress: 184/800

  I gained 2. This was also my second nest, and I had earned nothing from the first.

  “I think we did alright,” she added.

  “Me too.” We bumped fists.

  “You’re right, though. That was way different from a dungeon crawl. It was like the whole room was trying to kill us. The cars, the trash, everything.”

  I nodded.

  “That was a hell of a rush too,” she continued. “Dungeons get my heart pumping, but all that creeping around and then suddenly a rush of monsters? That’s a different sensation. Like, there’s so much buildup to the fight.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What now? We just leave their bodies?”

  I shrugged. “I guess? I don’t know what the EPA does with corpses, but they’ll get here and see we did the hard work for them.”

  As we gathered my arrows, Megan said, “That was my first berserker. No captain has let me into that boss fight yet.”

  “Same.”

  “My shield arm is going to be real stiff tomorrow. He hit fucking hard.”

  “Sounded like it.”

  “Thank you for taking a chance on letting me come,” Megan added. “I know we don’t know each other that well, but I feel like I clicked immediately with your group–you, Nathan, Beth. I wouldn’t have done this with Saito.”

  “Lofold?”

  Megan laughed. “Absolutely not.”

  I joined her laughter. “I feel you on clicking. I think we worked pretty well together, especially for a first run.”

  Megan looked around at the encampment one last time. “So, we’re doing this again next weekend, right?”

  On the way home, Megan downloaded my GoPro footage to her laptop. She seemed nervous when she asked if she could, but I had no issue with that. I wanted to see the fight from her perspective as well, so she promised to email me her footage later that night.

  Sunday evening the next day. Beth cooked and invited Megan to join us.

  “Is dinner exciting enough for you guys?” Nathan asked, grinning.

  Megan rolled her eyes and gently pushed his shoulder. “What’s in this meatloaf? It’s so good.”

  Beth smiled. “Thank you. The secret is some barbecue sauce in the ketchup.”

  “Huh. Yeah, I can taste a little brown sugar, I think.”

  “It is really good,” Nathan concurred.

  “Sooo Jonathon was cute,” Megan teased.

  Beth blushed. “Yes, he is.”

  Megan laughed. “How long have you two been seeing each other?”

  “Couple weeks. He’s a sweet guy. He volunteers with this youth baseball league, and he’s so good with them.”

  “Yeah?”

  Nodding, Beth said, “I went today to watch. It’s so cute.”

  “Is it serious?”

  Beth looked at me suspiciously.

  I raised my hands. “I didn’t put her up to this. I promise.”

  “No,” Beth answered. “We’re just hanging out right now. If I wanted to be married at eighteen, I would have stayed home.”

  Megan nodded approvingly. “That’s the right move. Shop around for a while.”

  “Is that what you did?” Nathan asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m pretty expensive myself, you know,” he joked.

  “Me too.”

  “I am very aware.”

  While I was happy for Nathan, I preferred to not be in the front row for this flirting. “I’m glad you’re you,” I said to Beth. “I’ll always worry, but knowing you’re smart makes it easier.”

  “We haven’t had sex yet. If we do, I’ll use protection.”

  “Are you all in on trying to torture me tonight?” I groaned.

  Everyone at the table laughed.

  “I want to hear about the hunt yesterday,” Beth said. “Or is it a secret?”

  “Umm…” Megan looked at me. “Can we step outside for a sec?”

  I obliged. We shut the door to the apartment and talked in the hallway.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I thought this conversation should be private, though. I have the crawl footage.”

  “Right…”

  “I edited it together last night, so it’s a more complete view of the run than looking at just one file or the other. I didn’t want to say this in front of Beth in case you were uncomfortable with sharing that.”

  “Thank you for being that considerate,” I said. “I’m okay with it.”

  Megan bounced back into the apartment and sat down with a smile.

  Nathan glanced about suspiciously. “What’s going on?”

  “If you guys want to watch the run, I edited everything together last night.”

  Beth wiggled in her seat, clapping. “Yes!”

  A few minutes later, we moved all of our plates of meatloaf to the living room. Megan put the video up on the screen.

  She fast-forwarded to the moment we entered the final warehouse, right before the fighting began. Presently, we saw from Megan’s perspective while my view was in the corner. She said the term for it was “picture in picture.” With this approach, we would always be able to see both angles.

  The focus switched to my view when I climbed on top of the first car, making my view big and Megan’s the small one in the corner.

  I assumed Megan would have edited the footage for herself, highlighting her own contributions, which wouldn’t have been selfish. That just made sense for the time she put into this. But that’s not what this was.

  Instead, she always prioritized whose camera had the best footage at that second. The footage of Megan using Rapid Attack was nearly indecipherable because of her speed, for example. We watched most of that action from my perspective, and it was as impressive on the rewatch as it was in person.

  “Why are your voices weird?” Beth asked.

  “I used a voice changer,” Megan answered. “The easiest way to share these with each other would be a private YouTube channel. Technically, only the two of us would have access, but I’m paranoid and changed the voices so no one could recognize us if the video got out somehow. I also bleeped out the times we used each other’s names, which wasn’t until after when we were clearing the warehouse. We didn’t use names once until then, weirdly. I blurred our faces too.”

  “So, I’m dating a certified badass,” Nathan declared. “That was nuts.”

  Now it was Megan’s turn to blush.

  “Are berserkers rare?” Beth asked.

  “For wild goblins, kind of,” I answered. “From what I’ve read, this nest was on the small side for a berserker, but it happens. In the gates we crawl, berserkers are dungeon bosses sometimes.”

  “You killed a dungeon boss!”

  “Take it easy,” Megan interjected. “They are dungeon bosses in E-ranked gates. That’s not impressive.”

  Beth shrugged. “It is to me. You should share these online.”

  “There’s not much of an audience for wild hunter footage. Most of this run was just us walking a bunch.”

  “So? You said you were frustrated that information on wild goblins was so limited. You could help someone like you, and your voices are already changed. No one would know it’s you two.”

  “I’m not opposed,” Megan offered.

  I thought for a moment. “If our identities are scrubbed, sure.”