by DoctorHepa
Carl: Well that’s terrifying. And that’s only a city boss.
Elle: Yeah. I’m on my way back to the crew now, but I just talked a group out of attacking the province boss at station 48. One day we might be strong enough to fight one of those things, but it ain’t gonna be on this floor. Fuck that. You can hear it screaming from here.
I walked back to the cart and took one more screenshot. The mimic appeared to be forming into a large building, though it was still in mid-transformation. It was taking the shape of an Iron Tangle administrative structure, though it had so much mass, it had to make the building huge. A mouth that had to be 300 feet wide comprised the entire first floor. Each jagged tooth was the size of a person. A red, lumpy, train-sized tongue lolled out of the mouth, reaching off-screen.
The entire building and mouth was faced directly at the portal. I knew if I took another screenshot in a minute, the mouth would be gone, and only the building would remain.
It’s waiting for us.
Carl: Sorry, Donut.
Donut: WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
I climbed back into the cockpit and turned the switch. The portal to trainyard E shut off. I looked down at Bautista where he stood next to Katia. “New plan. We go through the abyss portal instead of the cart portal. I have enough hats in my inventory for everybody here, so we don’t need to worry about fighting this mimic thing. It’s expecting us, and if we go through that portal, we’d be like pigs walking to slaughter.
Bautista looked relieved. “Thank god for plan B.”
“That was actually plan C,” Katia said.
* * *
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I said to Donut as we watched the last of the group make their way through the portal to yard H.
“You have to tell them to give the hats back after we go through,” she said. “Millions of gold, Carl. Millions!”
“They weren’t ours to begin with,” I said. “People gave them to us to help others.”
“We only have 83 of them left,” she sniffed. “I really want to buy the social media board. So we can see what people are saying about us.”
“Actually, it’s less than that.” I pulled thirty of the hats from my inventory and started tossing them onto the ground behind the cart. “In case there are any stragglers.”
Donut looked at me like I’d just slapped her. She made an incredulous, scoffing sound. “You know, it’s no wonder you were always so poor. There’s a fine line between being helpful and being a dumbass, Carl.”
“We still have over fifty of them.”
Katia laughed as Donut glowered. The cat looked back over my shoulder, as if she was contemplating jumping off the cart to go retrieve them. I put my own hat on my head. Donut didn’t want to remove her tiara, so instead she sighed and held an engineer’s key in her mouth. Mongo went into his carrier. I suspected that since the cart was allowed through the portal, we didn’t need either the hat or the key, but there was no sense risking it, especially since there was a cliff on the other side of the portal. Katia pulled the hat and plopped it on her head. It disappeared into her mass. A moment later, it reappeared as she did something to make it visible. She really was getting better at the doppelganger stuff. A lot better.
I eased the cart through the portal, and just like that, it was done.
Our plan was a success. There had been just over 1,400 people trapped at the end of the line, and we’d gotten them if not to safety, to a place where they at least had a chance.
The cart clunked loudly as it changed tracks. I eased off the throttle. Def Leppard’s “Rock of Ages” continued to blare from the immobile interdiction cart, but the song stopped a moment later after the guy with the sling scored a direct hit on the small trap.
There was this moment, right after the music abruptly ended, where our slow-moving cart coasted to a stop right behind the other cart, and we just faced the large crowd. The silence hung for a good few seconds, and then the 600 people broke out in applause. Bautista walked up and gave me a hug as we jumped off the cart, then he did the same to Katia. He patted Donut on the head.
“Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“We still have a little more than a day and a half, my friend,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But we couldn’t have made it here without your help. And for that I’ll be forever grateful.” He gave me a wink and pulled the hat off his head. He put it on the ground in front of Donut, who looked up at him with wide-eyed surprise. “For you, Princess Donut.”
“It’s not necessary, I’m sure,” she said, suddenly switching to her imperial voice. “Please, keep it. I insist.”
But suddenly there was a line of people, all of them putting their hats in a pile of front of Donut. Her eyes shined, and her jaw trembled, revealing her two lower fangs as the people, one by one bowed in front of her and dropped the stupid train hat on the ground in tribute. “Thank you, Princess,” they said, one by one.
“Of course,” she said to each person. “It was nothing. Our pleasure.”
Carl: Was this your idea?
Bautista: Your partner, Katia, suggested it.
I looked over at her, and she grinned.
Donut gathered all the hats up into her inventory, tail swishing with pleasure. I suspected now that most of the crawlers were all at the front of the lines, shopkeepers would be less likely to give us money for these things. But we held onto the moment. I didn’t know what was going to come next, or if we’d even done anything here today other than delay the inevitable, but it felt good.
By god, it felt good.
A note from DoctorHepa
So, I just finished writing the fourth floor. I will be posting the last few chapters over on Patreon as soon as I'm done editing them, which might take a hot minute. A lot of little twisty things happen at the end. Thanks everybody for your support. I can't wait to show you what's in store for the next one.
A gentle reminder that if you've read the first book, please consider heading over to Amazon to leave a review. I just hit 100+ ratings on the US store which is awesome.
Chapter 102
Time to Level Collapse: One day and 16 hours.
The group turned and headed toward the gate. We’d instructed them on how to find the employee line, which would be free of monsters. Bautista and about twenty others held back as I went through the complicated process of trying to get the cart switched over to one of the regular colored lines. It didn’t matter which one, as long as it had a platform at both 60 and 75. I walked ahead, switching the lines while Katia eased the cart forward.
“Whoa, hey. I just got a box from my sponsor,” Katia suddenly said. “A silver benefactor box.”
“Yay!” Donut said. “That means you have a sponsor box and a fan box to open!”
“I got a sponsor box not too long ago, too,” Bautista said. I reached up and manually slapped the transfer switch. It made a loud clunk. “But I haven’t had the chance to open it yet. I’m on my way to do it now.”
“Who is your sponsor, anyway?” I asked the tiger man.
“Jaxbrin Amusements, Limited. The same folks who make my babies.”
“Your babies?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this. Did you get any of them? Some do what I say, but sometimes they don’t, and I don’t know why. One even attacked me once. A green variant Slizzer. But the other Slizzers were fine. I still have another green variant, but I don’t dare use it now.”
I just looked at him. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
“Miss Quill? The old skyfowl lady from the last floor? Remember her?”
“I remember,” I said. I reached up and fingered the necklace with the small charm. How could I forget? She ended up being the head bad guy of the area. Her failed spell was the reason I had the about-to-explode nuke in my inventory. Bautista had a quest to kill her. A quest that failed because we’d inadvertently killed her when we blew a hole in the ceiling of the m
agistrate’s office. Bautista had been trying to get into her apartment at the time, but he’d found it empty except for…
“Are you talking about the beanie baby things?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. He pulled one from his inventory. A brown frog wearing a spiked helmet. It still had the tag on it. It was the same type of creature Mordecai was currently shape-shifted into. Bautista tossed the bean bag to me, and I caught it. I rolled it over in my hand.
Stuffed Grulke Infantry Figure. (With tags)
This is the most common variation of the Grulke line of collectible figures. In terms of rarity, these things clock in just below frat boys with early-onset liver disease. It’s literally not possible to enter a waystation kinder shop and not find one of these for sale on the shelf. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a collector who will buy this off you.
It sure is cute, though.
“Miss Quill had more than 1,000 different stuffed monsters in her apartment. So far, I’ve used about 40 of them. You can keep that one if you want. I have four more just like it, though one has a different colored hat. They’ll attack bad guys for you, and they’re pretty strong, but they’re common, and the common ones only last about fifteen to thirty seconds before they’re done.”
I read the little paper tag on the stuffed creature. All it said was “Grulke Infantry. Jaxbrin Amusements, Ltd.” There was a symbol of a smiley-faced star on the other side. That was it.
“Wait, these things turn into real versions?” I said. “I didn’t know that! How?”
“You pull the tag off. Like a grenade. And then you throw it. Takes about 10 seconds for it to work. Depending on what it is, it’ll fight for you. Or, like I said, attack you. The rarer it is, the longer it lasts. When they’re done, if they haven’t been killed, they turn back to the beanies, but the tag is gone, and you can’t use them again. If they do get killed, the little beans fly everywhere when they die and then disappear.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “We only have one. It’s a dude riding a horse. Named Kimaris. How did you figure it out?”
“The first one I did was called a Crane Crasher. A bird thing. We were sitting in a safe room, and I was just playing with it, and the tag came off. It came to life in my hands and flew to the ceiling, screaming. Then it attacked a guy in my party and teleported away. After that, I found another one. A Sage Sprite Lecturer. It said he was a teacher, so I pulled the tag. I thought he looked a little like my grandfather. He was helpful, but I should have saved him for later when I was better prepared. He was really rare and valuable. But he told me what was up with these things. Acted like I was an idiot for not knowing. He was one of my most valuable. Legendary rareness. Only one of five, but I didn’t know how to see that until he taught me. Lasted two whole hours. He was in this weird glass case. I have five more legendary rares, but I’m afraid to open the cases now because the description says there’s a chance I’ll be blasted with fire if I open the door. I can open them in safe rooms, but the Sage Sprite said the case and the item would both be ruined. I think maybe I can open it in my inventory, but I’m too scared to try.”
He was talking about a Sheol Glass Reaper Case. The same protective case my Kimaris figure had been in, but now housed Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. My Kimaris figure was a demon. It was also Unique, not legendary or rare.
“You just rip the tags off, and they appear?” I asked.
“That’s right. But you can actually rip the tag off inside of your inventory, which is what I do. It takes about two seconds off the summoning time. You gotta be careful, though, because if it’s a monster you’re not familiar with, you don’t know how big it’s going to get. Or how mean. Some of them are huge. Also, the sprite lecturer. His name was Atwin, by the way. He said these are actual summonings. So you must be careful. It looks like you’re making a new one because of the way the die. But you’re actually teleporting one of those creatures to you. I don’t really see the difference, but he insisted that was a big deal. I guess there are spells that say they’re summoning, but they’re really just creating a temporary, fake version. This is a true summoning.”
I thought of Donut’s clockwork triplicate spell. That was most definitely not a real summoning.
“What was the name of the one you had?” Bautista asked.
“Kimaris.”
“I don’t have that one. You should probably hold onto it until you know how valuable it might be. Anyway, I am worried I’m going to run out of these things. My class is something called a swashbuckler, and I need to practice more with my sword.” He patted the glowing, orange sword on his belt. “But I’ve been relying on these monsters a lot. That’s why I’m glad I got sponsored by Jaxbrin. I hope maybe they can replenish my supply.”
“You should train with your sword as much as you can anyway,” I said, suddenly worried for the man. “You can’t rely on somebody else’s goodwill to keep you supplied. Also, some of your friend’s levels are too low. The guy with the sling is good at 28, but his friend is only 21. That’s not enough. He’s getting left behind.”
“I know,” Bautista said. “We’re doing the best we can.”
* * *
Bautista and his team’s plan was to go find that free station 72. He promised they’d train on ghouls on another line until it was time to go. Apparently Tizquick, the dwarf with the daughter who never existed, was standing vigil at station 60, helping all the passing crawlers to find their way from one colored line to the next. I was actually starting to get worried about too many people congregating in the same place at once, though apparently there were actually two different stations 72s with blown ghoul generators now. And there were rumors of a station 12 that had also blown. The last I’d looked we still had just under 275,000 people running about the floor, and it would be much too easy for too many of them to crowd into the same place and get overrun.
In fact, that number of remaining crawlers actually seemed too high based on the number of people we had in our circle. I had at least one person in over a dozen different station 36s, but none of them had more than a thousand people. Most were more like 50 to 100. I talked about this some with the others, and we realized we simply didn’t know enough about the true nature of the floor to get an accurate picture of where all these people really were. Katia had, for a few days now, been saying that we were missing something when it came to the way the Iron Tangle was set up. She kept saying, “I don’t understand how there can only be six station mimics.” I told her it didn’t matter, not as long as we had an exit to our back and we’d done everything we could.
We said our goodbyes to Bautista’s team, and we found ourselves on the zomp line. We had two interdiction carts. The “E” cart, the one we’d driven all the way up the line, and the “Q” cart which we now called the Def Leppard cart. We dragged it behind us, facing backward so we were sandwiched between two portals, both tuned to the abyss. Nothing could get to us while we were on the track. Not unless it attacked us from the sides.
The plan was to make our way to Imani and Elle and Li Jun and reunite with their teams who were now camping and guarding station 36. They said they hadn’t seen a real monster in hours except an occasional ghoul. I told them we’d be there later. And to stay away from trainyard E, which now featured a brand-new resident.
In the meantime we were going to pick a random transit station and hit the safe room, open Katia’s boxes, watch the recap show, and then have ourselves a reunion.
* * *
We ended up stopping at station 59. The track was filled with ghouls and baby krakarens, who were now all about the size of small dogs. We teleported them all to the abyss as we rushed up the line. The only time we were in any sort of danger was as we passed station 24. The juvenile monsters covered the platform. There were thousands of the octopuses, swarming over each other. I tossed a precious jug o’ boom off the side of the train as we passed. Even then, almost a dozen of them were fast enough to leap onto the cart. Katia’s crossbow made short
work of them. They didn’t drop any loot at all, and their blood sizzled against the metal deck of the cart.
We stopped the two carts outside of platform 59 and left the portals on, both tuned to the abyss. Then we sent a message to everybody to stay off the zomp line. As long as the batteries held, and they appeared to last a really long time, nobody would mess with the carts. The transit station also had six other lines attached to it, but it was all clear as we walked to the saferoom, which was down stairs this time instead of up.
The swarming Krakaren babies appeared to be remaining close to station 24. For now. Meadow Lark was setting up a flame-thrower based kill zone at the choke points in case they were invaded. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
The saferoom at station 59 appeared to be a restaurant from Costa Rica called “Soda.” We pushed our way through the small room, past the Bopca, and into our personal space. It seemed like we hadn’t been here in forever.
“Open your boxes now,” I said, collapsing into the chair. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
Katia straightened. “Okay. I’m doing the fan box first.”
We’d already agreed we had to get this done as soon as possible, before Mordecai got back. The last thing we needed was that Chaco guy showing up and getting into another fight.
But we needn’t have worried. Two items popped out. A goddamned baseball bat and a shield. The shield was tall, about six feet high, and curved, shaped like a half cylinder. There were loops in it for her to either hold with both hands or to slide a single arm through.
There was a small, plastic-like window in the top of the shield for her to see through.
It had the words “Get Back” in Syndicate Standard emblazoned on the front in white, blocky letters.
“It’s a riot shield,” I said.
