by DoctorHepa
Carl: Shit. We know she’s alive. Where the hell is she then? Maybe try sidling up with one of the former daughters and asking them.
Elle: Already did. Talked to that fairy with the two mage daughters. She claims the bitch is not answering anyone. She might have come in with the rest of us, but if she did, she took off, and nobody says they’ve seen her. She’s probably off pouting somewhere.
Carl: Okay. Everything else good?
Elle: Same ol’ shit. Imani is mother hen-ing every damn person in here, even though they’re all terrified of her. Your friend Li Jun doesn’t know his best friend is in love with his sister even though she’s turned into a demon, and most of those girls from Hekla’s group are as helpless as I was when I was still in the wheelchair. On top of that, some crazy asshole who doesn’t want everybody to think he’s a crazy asshole is throwing a train full of explosives in our direction. So, you know. Typical day.
I laughed out loud as I tied the last piece of hobgoblin dynamite onto the pile. The train would splatter random ghouls on the way down the track, but I didn’t want the bomb going off until it hit one of the larger stage-3 monsters, who’d hopefully be in the midst of the gathering ghoul horde. The hobgoblin dynamite was much more stable than the regular goblin stuff and would, in theory, survive multiple impacts. Still, the bundle of dynamite was up high and shouldn’t go off until it was triggered. For that, I used a device I’d already built in anticipation for just this sort of thing. It was part of my first prototype for the landmine. A long pole with an impact-detonated hoblobber at the end. The pole was too high to hit the regular blister ghouls, but it would hit one of the giant stage-3 monsters. Or, if it missed, it’d go off when the train crashed into the back of the other train. Or if the whole thing derailed. Hopefully.
Bautista: The trains are definitely working. It’s raining crashed trains and monsters into the abyss. I haven’t seen any crawlers fall thankfully. But it’s a lot of those giant monsters. Are you getting experience for this? They’re splattering across the bottom of the abyss like hail.
Carl: No, unfortunately. The system can be damn stingy with experience. You never know what’s going to give it to you.
Bautista: Yeah. My pets usually give me experience if they kill something, but not as much as if I had done it myself. Sometimes, though, I don’t get any experience at all, and every once in a while I get a big bonus. I don’t know why.
Carl: Your pets? I didn’t know you had pets.
Bautista: It’s complicated. Most other crawlers think it’s a spell. I don’t want them to know the truth. It’s kind of embarrassing. I’ll explain it if we ever get together.
I liked Bautista, I thought as I finished building my train bomb, but his Tigran race made him look like a tiger that had been vomited upon by a Lisa Frank notebook. I didn’t know how anything could embarrass him.
It took a minute to get the pole positioned correctly, but once it was, I didn’t waste any more time.
“Everybody say goodbye to the vermillion train,” I called over my shoulder as I re-entered the gore-filled engine car. I waded through the starting-to-stink-even-worse entrails and bodies and hit the controls, easing the engine up to full speed. Just as I prepared to jump out the front window of the backward-moving train, I spied something sitting on the floor. It was one of Eva’s two sabers. She’d dropped it when Donut had raised Hekla from the dead. It’d fallen into the gore, and I’d forgotten about it. I grabbed it and pulled it into my inventory as I slid out the front window and jumped heavily to the track below.
Christ, I thought as I hit the gravel. I need another shower. I turned to watch the train rush backward down the track. It wouldn’t be long before it hit something.
The ground suddenly shook with a distant explosion. It didn’t come from the train, which I could still see. But the ground rumbled, like distant thunder. Dust fell from the ceiling.
What the hell was that?
Imani: Carl, are you okay?
Carl: That wasn’t my bomb. Mine is still on its way.
Imani: I thought you blew yourself up.
Carl: Not yet.
Donut, Katia, and Mongo came jogging up as I pulled myself off the track. “What was that?” Katia asked.
“Carl, what did you do?” Donut asked. “I thought you killed yourself.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounded far, far away. But it was big.”
I pulled up my chat to see if anybody knew what it was, and I saw with dismay that a group of four crawlers I’d tossed into a group I’d called “Yard F” were now all dead. For a horrifying minute, I thought maybe this was my fault, that I’d done something because of the portals. But that didn’t make any sense. None of the carts were tuned to that area.
But then I remembered that those guys weren’t trying to defend their station 36. They were part of a team that was attempting to kill the blister ghoul generator at one of the station 72s. It had to be pretty far away, but it was still loud and powerful enough that we felt it here.
“Holy crap,” I said. “I think they blew the soul crystal. I warned them that it was dangerous. Goddamnit.”
That group had been something like 300-400 people. The last I heard they were going to attempt to fight their way to the generator and remove the crystal or disable the machine.
I messaged everybody and told them what I suspected had happened.
Carl: Imani and Elle, you should get a group together and send them to sixty to see if they can find a platform that’ll take them to that F line. I don’t know what the color was, but somebody else might know. If the generator blew, everything over there will be dead, but the stairwells might still be open.
Imani: I was just thinking the same thing. If we don’t know the colors attached to the F station, how can we find it though?
Carl: Last time I went through station sixty, there was a dwarf sitting there at the entrance to all the colored-line portals. His name is Tizquick. Seek him out and ask him if he knows.
Elle: I’ll go. I’ll grab a squad and we’ll… holy shit!
The moment she said it, I heard and felt the new explosion. A whole line of experience notifications appeared. This one was my work. Not only had my train bomb gone off, it had killed a bunch of mobs. And I had gotten experience for it. More than I expected. I hit level 35. I didn’t get any achievements, which was kind of irritating, but my explosives handling skill ticked up to 11.
Elle: Yikes, Carl. That knocked everybody off their feet. You’re lucky I can fly.
Carl: Shit. Sorry about that. Is everyone okay?
Imani: Carl, let’s not do that again. Okay? I think everybody is fine. People guarding that entrance took some hearing damage, but nothing permanent. I think that line is good and sealed off now.
Elle: I think the mushroom guy shit himself.
I should have put the bomb bundle together at my sapper’s table. That way I could’ve seen and adjusted the bomb’s total yield. Hobgoblin dynamite was much more powerful than the regular stuff. In fact, next time I went into the crafting room, I’d put together some different-sized bundles so I had everything ready to go.
I sighed, thinking of everything we needed to do. Part of me really wished we had a hundred or more of these carts. That way we could strategically park them around the stairwells. But as it was, they had so many entrances that it wasn’t feasible. Plus we only had one Growler Gary. We still didn’t know how long until the portal carts would reach the abyss. The level timer was now at two days and twenty hours. That meant we had just over a day until Mordecai returned. I wondered if we had enough time to go back to the trainyards to build a few more train bombs. That’d be a great way to farm more experience.
And while we were now seeing mobs suffering stage-3 of the DTs, we still hadn’t seen what happened when the DTs killed them. I had a suspicion of what was going to be, but how that would be implemented, I had no idea.
“Carl,” Donut called. “You pissed off the ghouls. Now t
hey’re heading toward us!”
Sure enough, with the tunnel officially sealed off, the ghouls being generated at 72 had stopped heading toward 36 and now were coming this way. I could already see them shuffling up toward us on the edge of my map.
Shit, I thought, thinking once again of Growler Gary. We’d collected one extra pair of hands from the poor gnoll, but it turned out we were actually one pair short.
I couldn’t use the portal carts to protect the others, but we could certainly use it to protect ourselves right here and right now.
“Guys,” I said, “help me position one of the carts on the track. Then we gotta go talk to Gary again.”
* * *
We placed the turned-on portal into the tunnel, blocking it like a cork. The blister ghouls didn’t even pause. They dropped like lemmings right into the abyss. We had the cart parked at the edge of the vermillion line. My explosion appeared to have knocked the power out. We had to run the carts off of battery power, but that was fine. I now had plenty of them.
We had the second cart, the one with two fresh hands lashed to it, pointed in the other direction on the track. Only a handful of additional stage-three monsters had appeared over the past few hours. According to the prattle on my chat, the stage-three monsters were mostly heading toward station 24. They were running down the tracks, reaching outrageous speeds. But they were also coming up from the trainyards, so they were either riding the rollercoaster line—though I didn’t know how—or they were getting portaled there. I suspected maybe those neighborhood bosses at the Krakaren drug dens had something to do with that. But the monsters weren’t actually entering stop 24. They would stop and camp just outside of the station, oftentimes fighting with one another.
The few who did come down our track from the north did not voluntarily throw themselves into the pit. Instead, they stood there at the edge, growling and snapping with their round mouths while I observed them through the distorted haze of the tunnel-width portal.
We’d spent the past few hours grinding against the constant stream of ghouls. I’d turn off the south-facing portal, and we’d advance and kill. I practiced with my xistera some, and Donut was practicing with mounted attacks. Katia practiced with forming spikes on her arms and using them as weapons.
She also spent some time in her smaller form with Eva’s saber. The description said it was part of a set and only magical when the two weapons were together. Otherwise, the enchanted saber, called The Left Fang of the Green Sultan, offered no buffs or powerups. That was good, however, as it meant Eva had also lost her main weapon.
The level-20 ghouls did not pose a serious challenge, but they were useful for practicing new techniques, if not for experience.
The stage-three monsters, I knew, would be a much better trial. We had a new technique we needed to try out, and it required a higher-tier, stronger monster to test it on.
While the DT monsters didn’t voluntarily throw themselves into the portal, I knew I could curate our battle experience on that side easily by hopping onto the cart and pushing it forward, sucking in the stage-three monsters until there was only one left. The portal, when tuned to the abyss, was unforgiving. Like with the rope we tried earlier, if just a tiny portion of the creature touched the edge of the magical gateway, the whole thing was sucked in like a strand of spaghetti.
Bautista was giving me a running update of all the oddities that were raining into the abyss. We still had an estimated two hours left before the carts would arrive. We didn’t know for certain that all three carts were still moving, but I was hopeful based on the sheer amount of stuff falling into the pit.
We weren’t ready for how powerful the stage-three monster was. The thing was stronger than a regular neighborhood boss. The system didn’t allow us to properly examine the creatures through the window of the portal’s backside, so I couldn’t read the description until we were ready to fight.
But one thing was obvious even before I turned off the portal. It didn’t matter what sort of monster was the original source of the creature, whether it be a massive ogre or a tiny, rat-sized mob. By the time they reached stage-three of the DTs, they were all pretty much the same creature: a hippo-sized monstrosity with thrashing tentacles on its back. Instead of a normal face, they held nothing but a round mouth circled with teeth. There was a skull there, visible through its transparent, jelly-like skin, a talisman of the creature it once was. For this one, it was a small skull, much smaller than the bear-like skulls we’d seen before. The creatures looked over-inflated, like they’d explode at any moment. The things bulged with veins, reminding me of the second boss we faced, the Juicer. The tentacles were thick and meaty, with round, thrashing mouths at the end.
“Okay, get ready,” I said to Katia. Donut stood back with Mongo on the platform while I sat up on the raised cockpit of the rapid-response cart. I was afraid the monster would trash the cart, so the plan was to back it up and out of danger. I’d then leap down to engage while Katia did her thing from the edge of the platform.
Katia rolled back and formed into the sentinel gun. Three, spider-like legs formed, turning her into a tripod. The flesh-colored shield went up, and the automatic crossbow, which had been sitting in her inventory, appeared, locking into place just behind the shield. A firing slit appeared, which she could open and close like a mouth.
“I’m ready,” she said. She’d formed a pair of eyes and a mouth just behind and above the lump of flesh that held the crossbow, allowing her to peer down onto her target. The plan was to eventually form eyes strategically on the exterior of the large, half-moon shape shield, but she wasn’t quite ready for that.
“Okay, here we go,” I said.
I pushed forward with the cart, and the single monstrosity scattered back, having seen his friends sucked away earlier. I reversed the throttle and quickly backed up, turning off the portal that blocked the tunnel. I jumped from the cart’s cockpit, crunching onto the gravel. The monster continued to run away for a good ten or twelve more seconds before realizing he’d been bamboozled. Now a distance speck down the track, he stopped and turned back toward us. He howled indignantly, turned, and charged.
Razor Fox. Level 22.
Warning: This mob is suffering from the DTs. It is in stage three of three.
In stage three, this mob’s form has changed, and it bears very little resemblance to its original self. Kind of like how all you humans did after you finally got out of quarantine. It is now covered with multiple tentacles. If this monster has recently fed on another living creature, the contents of its stomach may be quite valuable. Or toxic. Or explosive. Or worse. That’s what makes these guys so fun.
Unfortunately for them, this form is only temporary. The DTs are always fatal.
I’d explain to you what a Razor Fox is here, but it’s pointless because this isn’t a Razor Fox anymore. It’s a shame, really. I kinda love those ninja-star-throwing fuckers. But all is not lost. We’ll have normal versions of these guys on the fifth floor, too. Too bad you won’t be seeing them since you’re probably about to get ripped to shreds.
A moment passed, and then it was in range. Katia opened fire. Thwap, thwap, thwap, thwap. The bolts shot out of the large crossbow, coming at about two a second, which was pretty damn fast, but not nearly as fast as it’d been before when Hekla owned it. The crossbow was auto-loading, cocking, and firing. All she had to do was hold the prod down, and it’d start spamming bolts like one of those tennis ball machines.
Each magical, razor-tipped bolt was about twenty-inches long. The bolts disappeared on their own about a minute after being fired, but that was plenty of time to do some serious damage. The monster bayed as the bolts tore at its face and side, like a nail gun. Each hit knocked its health down, but only a tiny bit.
What the hell? How strong were these assholes?
One of the side effects of Katia forming into these odd shapes was that it confused monsters. Like when she was the train’s scoop, the mobs hadn’t realized she was livi
ng flesh and hadn’t attacked her directly. This mob, despite being riddled with holes, reacted the same way. The only living creature he saw was me. He howled again and charged.
The thing was terrifyingly fast. I loaded a banger and twirled, tossing the metal projectile directly at the round mouth. The ball shattered teeth as I scored a hit. It made a strangled noise and stopped, sliding on the rail. Katia continued to pump it with bolts, and now Donut joined the fray, tossing Magic Missiles into the creature from Mongo’s back.
The monster whimpered as it tried to dislodge the metal ball in its throat. I loaded another, this one a half-strength, impact-detonated hob lobber. It was too close for a full strength. I fired again, again getting it into the monster’s giant mouth. I took out another tooth, like I was playing a game at the carnival. One more, and I win a prize. There was a muffled thump. Its tentacles thrashed about, one of them grasping a wooden railroad tie and breaking it in half. The monster was no longer focused on me or anybody else. It was starting to look like a hedgehog from all the bolts. Injury to its body only did minor damage. We had to get inside its mouth.
I started to shout for everybody to focus on the area when it suddenly exploded. Sizzling gore showered the track. It’d blown from the inside out, like a water balloon filled with Beefaroni.
The battle was over just as quickly as it started.
“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t even know how we killed it. Either those bolts suck ass, or that thing is tough.”
“Carl, I didn’t get any experience at all,” Donut said. “These things cheat.”
Katia returned to her regular form. She wore the backpack to make the sentinel gun, but only had enough metal to form the shield. We’d practice with larger versions. Plus as her crossbow skill increased, we’d try to find another one. She could only “wield” two weapons at a time, but I didn’t know what that really meant. I suspected it’d let her form five or six arms that could shoot five or six bows, but she’d only receive bonuses from two. But I wasn’t certain.