For all that the media focuses on the big dungeons like Nightmare or Volcanic Range, the average dungeon is weak and boring. Relatively speaking. Some are so weak that people are able to exit under their own power.

The time (and backlash) of espers is rare and precious, even more so for the ones who are useful for dungeoneering. For those quotidian dungeons, the task of sealing them falls to Specialist Conrad Ferrer and his kind: Dungeon Response Teams of entirely unpowered people with rifles and body armor.

Boise, Idaho is a city of around 250 thousand people. Including the adjacent city of Meridian, that jumps to around 350 thousand people. They get several dungeons weekly.

Dungeon Response Teams in the US are managed both on the city police level and on the federal military level. Boise has the latter. A little south of Boise Airport is the headquarters of the Idaho Military Division. It has four crews of ten to twelve soldier with four to six support personnel, each doing 12 hour shifts so that there is round-the-clock coverage. SPC Ferrer is part of the 3-on 3-off, 4-on 4-off day shift crew.

They get a call. There's a portal in North End, average size, two confirmed abductions. Here's the address. It's the day after New Year's. Dungeons do not respect holidays. At the very least they had the decency not to come on New Year's Day itself.

They put on their gear, get in the truck, and go. They turn on the sirens. There are eleven in his crew with him in the truck, and there's an ambulance with a paramedic and two EMTs following behind. There were supposed to be twelve, but Smith drank too much last night and is hungover. Ugh. He'll be reprimanded for that, but it means they'll have one less soldier with them for this dungeon.

They arrive. Sergeant Robinson takes point. You can't see into dungeons, so SOP is to have someone go in, record everything visible and audible for them for five seconds, then immediately step back out to plan. Just because the average dungeon is weak and boring doesn't mean it's incapable of killing or maiming.

It seems like a straightforward dungeon. A small park, maybe football stadium size, with trees and walking paths. At the other end is a water fountain with the dungeon core at the top of it. No environmental hazards visible.

The monsters come in the form of dogs. Tiny chihuahuas to big huskies. A dog park dungeon.

The plan is to eliminate all the monsters, sweep the area for kidnappees, then destroy the dungeon core and get out. Simple. They check their gear and go in.

They split into three teams, advancing in turns to hide near trees while the other provides covering fire. The dogs don't seem to have ranged attacks, but staying near a wall or a tree reduces the attack surface in any case.

The dungeon's dogs are the same strength as regular dogs and are trivially dispatched by small arms fire. They try to bite at them but they're wearing full-body armor with face-covering helmets. A huskie jumps at Robinson and makes him fall over. Ferrer kicks it away and shoots it dead with his rifle.

They eventually reach the dungeon core — they think they've gotten rid of all the monsters. Beside it are arrays of cages. There's a man and a woman in there, imprisoned. They shoot the padlocks holding them inside. They shriek from the loudness of the rifle fire.

"You're safe now. I'm from the US Army Dungeon Response Team," he says to the man, offering a hand. "Can you walk?"

The man nods and takes his hand. He has a laceration from his arm, probably from the dogs. Ferrer hauls him up and supports him. Vasquez does the same for the woman. The rest form a perimeter around them as they're escorted to the portal to be dealt with by the support team.

Turner sets up an explosive charge at the dungeon core. Ferrer stays to watch over them while the rest make another round through the dungeon to ensure that there really isn't anyone else left. Then, they form up at the portal, and Turner detonates it. Robinson steps out to confirm that the real dungeon core has been destroyed — virtually no dungeon of this caliber has fake dungeon cores but this is a cheap test to do — then steps back in to tell them.

All of them exit before they're trapped by the collapsing dungeon.

The medical team looks them over once they've tended to the kidnappees. They only have mild injuries and mildly dehydration from spending the entire day in the cages with no water. They're going to be brought to the hospital to receive more tests and counseling but it's not urgent — right now they are tearfully calling their family and friends.

Ferrer and his squad are free of dungeon parasites and diseases! Robinson got bruised from his fall earlier but doesn't need any treatment.

They go back to the base. There's paperwork to be done and recordings to be submitted. The dungeon data analysis and research industry is huge, and they want as much data as they can give. Conrad finds it terribly boring but understands that if this data lets them squeeze out even just a tiny bit more speed or efficiency in their work, that could be the difference between someone dying and not. He dutifully fills out all the forms and reports.

He's finished with all his work. The call came in around noon, and now it's 1721. His shift is from 0600-1800. Unless another dungeon decides to pop into existence, which is extremely unlikely, he's finished with his work. He can't actually leave until the clock strikes 1800, of course. So he's just going to...sit at his desk. He is rather tired after than dungeon clear.

For some reason, he can't stop thinking about diseases. There are dungeons that carry diseases. That's why they do checks on everyone who exits a dungeon, even if most don't have anything like that. It's a cheap test to do.

He has always had good health and a good immune system and he was spared even the seasonal flus that come around every once in a while. The last time he got sick was...seven years ago? He got pneumonia. There was something of an outbreak in school.

He read that, in earlier times, cities were so ridden with disease that more people died in them than were born. The only reason they maintained their population was because more and more people went into them from the countryside.

He also read that early agriculturalists had worse diets than hunter-gatherers. They had less varied diets. They were shorter.

They've progressed from that era, now. They had a better standard of living than both those groups of people. But now they have dungeons to contend with.

Conrad is and was very fond of hiking, even when he was younger. Not as part of a group like Scouts or anything. He would just...go. His family lived in rural Florida, near Tallahassee and they were...well, they were not the most attentive parents. They had four kids and as long as he was back home before dinner, he could just do whatever.

He would walk around the marshes and look at the animals and the plants. The migrating monarch butterflies, the brown pelicans, the otters. The sea myrtle, the red cedar, the yucca. He was interested in nature, sure, and he contemplated being a biologist or something like that. But the main draw was...it wasn't alone time, exactly. His parents had a really big but old house and he had a bedroom all by himself. If he wanted to just be alone, he could go in it.

What was the draw? It's that...he was totally, utterly free. He was away from it all. Here in nature, he existed in a state of nature. Raw and unshaped. As he was. There was no one who was observing him. There were no rules to follow. It was just him and the world.

It was something of a wonder how anyone could survive in any state other than that. Here, in the city, he ate food that someone else grew. Worked for an organization big enough he hadn't met its leader in person. Lived in an apartment that someone else built. He trusted strangers with his life. Any time he went to a restaurant to eat, he was trusting that people prepared the food correctly. Or at worst, didn't poison him. It was a wonder, really, how he wasn't dead yet, even at the young age of 21.

It wasn't necessary to live like this. He has agency. He could choose to exercise this agency. 

He grabs his bag. He starts walking out.

    "Ferrer, where are you going?"

He doesn't need to answer that question. That is an untrustworthy entity who would seek to imprison and trap him just as surely as that dungeon imprisoned and trapped those people in cages. Except the bars of the cage are invisible. He starts running.

What is happening? Is there an emergency? They're going to follow after him, running.

From a different perspective, this could be seen as chasing after him.

He runs faster. He needs to get out of this place. He needs to get to somewhere safe.

He gets into his car and drives away, speeding. To the northwest of Boise is the Boise National Forest. It's big. Big enough to support him. Big enough to protect him. It's a couple of hours away. He goes.

He can't stay with his car. Yes, it's his, but someone else built it. He doesn't even know how it fully works, only how to operate it. And it has a license plate number and everything. He could be tracked with it.

He drives off the road, hides the car in a copse of trees, and gets out. Done.

A problem immediately presents itself. Boise is not in Florida. Which is to say — it gets cold in winter. And it's January. He still has his body armor and everything on, so that's not nothing, but. He needs to get shelter which is not his car. The car is untrustworthy.

That's fine. He has survivalism skills, both self-taught and from his military training. And he can learn. He can learn how to live off the land and make everything himself and rely on no one else.

He has a bug-out bag in his car which has supplies in it. Is that trustworthy?

More than the car, at least. He's willing to use them until he's able to make his own, at which point he'll stop using them.

He walks. Away from the car that is Bad and Untrustworthy. It's dark — the sun set hours ago — but he finds a rock overhang with a creek nearby. This seems like a good spot to set up for now.