We stood on the train platform, staring in dismay as the Nightmare Express pulled out of the station.

We had spent eighteen hours preparing for this while we waited for Carl's Protective Shell cooldown to expire. The man himself was about to lose his mind at the amount of time that was passing without us being able to do any significant grinding, but there was nothing to do. He had been barely placated by us sitting on the platform for the mauve line killing mobs whenever the doors opened, but it was an inconsequential amount of experience. Donut and I simply stayed out of his way while he fretted. I had practiced endlessly with my new mass while she worked on her Hole and Clockwork Triplicate spells. We used the training room for our daily enhanced session once it reset. Carl and Donut went to the Desperado Club for a bit (at least this time Donut remembered not to invite me). We slept, we showered, we reset our buffs, we brainstormed possible problems and solutions for them, and we watched people get gratuitously murdered on the recap show.

The top-10 crawlers all got thirty seconds to a minute devoted to them; Carl's clip was when he killed Dismember, except after he dropped the head they spliced in footage of him laughing and pitch-shifted it to make it sound like an insane giggle. It made me wonder if I should believe the scene of Lucia Mar bare-handedly ripping apart the dead bodies of a dozen fairy-class mobs that looked like Renaissance cherubs.

Two-thirds of the way through the show, Donut shrieked in anger.

"That's the poser who stole our box!" She pointed at the screen in outrage. "Cheater! Thief! That should have been ours!"

On the recap, Quan Ch flew down one of the tunnels like Superman, his glowing robe flapping with the speed of his passage. He smashed through the front of a train, a blue bubble momentarily flashing around him at the impact. The scene cut, showing him firing lasers out of his hands at a massive snake. Another cut showed him destroying a wasp nest the size of a small house by smashing into it and then firing lasers out in all directions. The scenes continued in quick succession. Unlike the top-10 crawlers, Quan Ch got three full minutes.

Current Leaderboard

Lucia Mar - Lajabless - Black Inquisitor General - Level 35 - 1,000,000 Hekla - Amazonian - Shield Maiden - Level 33 - 500,000 Prepotente - Caprid - Forsaken Aerialist - Level 30 - 400,000 Florin - Crocodilian - Shotgun Messenger - Level 31 - 300,000 Miriam Dom - Human - Shepherd - Level 29 - 200,000 Carl - Primal - Compensated Anarchist - Level 32 - 100,000 Donut - Cat - Former Child Actor - Level 28 - 100,000 Ifechi - Human - Physicker - Level 20 - 100,000 Quan Ch - Half Elf - Imperial Security Trooper - Level 34 - 100,000 Elle McGib - Frost Maiden - Blizzardmancer - Level 19 - 100,000

Three hours before we were due to depart, Carl received his Benefactor Box from the Valtay. It contained a small blue and yellow capsule; he looked dubiously at it but swallowed it, at which point he told us that he could now see 'subspace portals', whatever that meant. We discussed it for a few minutes and then went back to practicing until it was time to go murder monsters.

The conquest of the Nightmare Express should have been simple: It arrives, we get aboard the engine (if possible) or the first passenger car (if necessary), wait for the train to be at speed, Carl pops off his Protective Shell. Bing, bang, boom. The Shell stays in place, the train moves through it at high speed, all the mobs on the train get pancaked.

In practice, not so much.

The Nightmare Express was longer than the colored lines, it ran on a wider-gauge track, and it was pulled by a coal-fired steam engine instead of an electric one. The engine car was completely black with slashes of angry red paint and a patina of soot. The front had a wedge-shaped cowcatcher that looked like fangs and there were two windows shaped like angry eyes, giving the whole thing a demonic appearance. It was twice as long as the colored lines, pulling forty cars instead of twenty, and most of them were livestock or tanker cars instead of passenger cars. Unlike any of the other trains we had seen, this one had a caboose on the back.

When it arrived it was immediately clear that the showrunners had expected something like our plan and were having none of it. The gangways were blocked off with flexible tubing, all except for the one between the first passenger car and the engine, but that one wasn't accessible because it pulled forward past the end of the platform to where the wall blocked it. There was a mesh curled over the top of the train so it was impossible to jump up onto it. There was a bit more than a meter of space between the top of the mesh and the roof of the cars and the door to the second car was exit-only. Clearly, the intent was for us to climb up the caboose's ladder and then crawl along the top of the train, drop down onto the only exposed gangway, and enter the engine that way.

Easier said than done, since most of the cars were open-topped box cars from which we could hear growls and snarls. One of the cars was a tanker car and I could see massive tentacles waving over the edge.

"Fuck this," Carl said, backing up. "Back off, we need a new plan."

We pulled back to the base of the stairs, all of us half-expecting a deluge of monsters to pour out of the train. None did. Instead, the train waited the expected sixty seconds and then slowly chuff-chuffed its way out of the station. Carl counted under his breath as it went and when it was gone he shook his head.

"A minute and a half to get out of the station," he said. "My Protective Shell only lasts twenty seconds."

"We are not fighting our way through that," I said.

"We certainly are not," Donut agreed. "One of those cars had water. I do not do water, Carl."

"Yeah, I know. I remember having to go to the ER for stitches the first time I tried to give you a bath." The words were distracted, only half his attention on us.

"We could just get on one of the colored trains and go up the line the long way," I offered diffidently. Even I didn't like that idea; we were coming up on seven days remaining and getting from here to the end of the line would take two of them.

Carl rubbed the back of his neck, looking uncomfortable. "I've got an idea," he said. "You're not going to like it."

"Oh dear," Donut said. She gave an overdone school-play sigh. "What is it?"

"Donut, you and I go down the tunnel a bit and wait for the next train to come," he said. "When it does, and just as it starts slowing down, I cast Protective Shell and you use Puddle Jumper to teleport us back to the platform. The driver and everything else on the train dies but the brakes are already set, so the train slows down to a stop."

"What if the door to the engine car is locked?" I asked.

"Then we're screwed no matter what. I don't think it will be, though. The point of having that one gangway exposed is so that we can get to the engine."

"We could try jumping onto it as it pulls through the station," I suggested.

He shook his head. "It's schmuck bait. They've set it up to make us do this crawl along the top. Trying to bypass that is going to just get us killed."

"Maybe, but we could try. Have a clockwork Mongo test it the next time the train goes through."

"It's an hour and a half until the next train. If we do your test and it doesn't work then we'd have to wait another hour and a half for it to come around again before we could Shell it. We've already wasted too much time. Puddle Jumper is line of sight, so Donut can just teleport us to the platform."

"Yes, but it's got a three-second delay between casting it and having it go off," Donut said. "And it only teleports people who are next to me and aren't moving, and it fails if I move during those three seconds. If you get the timing wrong then we're dead."

"If I get the timing wrong?" Carl said. "You're the one casting it."

"It's your plan, Carl."

He shook his head. "Fine, whatever. I still don't think it's that big a risk. It's a risk, yes, but it's manageable and we can't always play it safe in here."

Personally, I thought he was crazy and this plan was suicide, but I wasn't going to say it.

"Oh, very well," Donut said. "But if I die then I'm blaming you."

"That's fair."

I bit my lip. There was clearly no point in arguing any further, so I simply nodded and said, "Okay."

We waited in mostly silence for the train to come. Carl continued reading his Louis L'Amour novel. Donut continued working on her Hole spell and training Mongo to stick his head through and bite on command. The spell was up to level 3 now, meaning it made a hole nine centimeters deep. I practiced my shapeshifting; I had realized that if I could shift my skin around then I could rotate the skin from my feet up my leg and replace it with new skin from below. That meant I wouldn't have to take the shoes off in the shower in order to get clean.

I was lost in concentration, jolting loose only when Carl closed his book.

"It's time," he said. "It'll be here in ten minutes."

"This is a crazy idea, Carl," Donut said. She sighed. "Come on, Mongo." She sucked him into her extradimensional carrier and hopped onto Carl's shoulder.

"Good luck," I said, wishing that Donut had left me Mongo. If Carl and Donut died it would have been nice to have a companion. Would have made it a lot easier for me to survive, too. Still, maybe he wouldn't have been willing to let her go alone into the darkness. Plus (whispered a tiny and shameful part of me), the carrier was a dungeon magic item and would probably survive impact with a train. I might be able to find it afterwards and let Mongo out. I winced at the thought and pushed it away; it was too close to wishing for my friends' deaths.

"Thanks," Carl said. Donut waved to me as Carl hopped off the platform and onto the tracks, then jogged up the tunnel into the darkness.

I waited, one foot juddering nervously.

I waited until I couldn't stand still and then I started pacing.

I waited, and waited, and waited...

Level Up! Level Up! You are now level 26.

A train whistle shrieked. Moments later Donut came bounding out of the tunnel like her tail was on fire and leaped onto the platform. She spun around and stared back down the tunnel, heaving for air.

"Carl! Hurry!" she shouted. "Please hurry!"

Carl sprinted out of the tunnel, his Dexterity letting him move faster than any normal human could possibly run. The train was almost literally on his heels; he wasn't going to make it.

He leaped, aiming for the platform, but the train caught him in mid-air. The cowcatcher bounced him up; he got caught on the small lip between the boiler and the top of the cowcatcher. The train rushed on into darkness, carrying his broken body away from us.

"CARL!" Donut shrieked.

Carl: I'm okay!

Donut: HOW ARE YOU OKAY?! WHY DID YOU LET THE TRAIN HIT YOU?! COME BACK!

Carl: It's okay, Donut. Breathe. I'm—ow, fuck that's hot. The train hit me on my feet, so let's hear it for having invulnerable feet. That plus a high Con and a Heal spell and a potion and I'm doing okay. I broke out the window and I'm in the cabin. The engineer is dead. Hang on while I check the rest of it.

Donut's fur had been standing out straight like it was under a static charge, but it finally began to relax and some of the tension went out of her body.

"What happened?" I asked. "I thought you were going to teleport back to the platform?"

"The AI lies," she grumbled. "The description on the spell says it's line of sight, but it's not. We went too far down the tunnel and when I set up to cast it I couldn't get us closer than a hundred meters. We had to run the rest of the way and Carl is so slow."

Carl: Wow. Yeah, everything on the train is suuuuper dead. A lot of the cars were destroyed on top of it. Okay, I'm going to figure out how to take control of the train. It's a loop; I'll take it up to 436, check it out, and then come back to you guys. Hey, I got an achievement saying that there were three bosses on the train and they're dead now. You guys should be able to get the map and tell me where I am.

Donut: YOU WANT US TO GET ON THE TRACKS AGAIN??!?!?!

Carl: It's fine. We know there's only one train on this track and I'm on it. It would be another 90 minutes for me to get back to you even if I wasn't going to stop.

Donut: OKAY, BUT YOU BETTER NOT SQUISH US!

I didn't even argue, I just jumped off the platform with her. Mongo followed immediately after and the three of us prowled up the tunnel until we found the detritus of the Nightmare Express.

The train had been ripped apart in the process of running through the Protective Shell. The impact of huge bodies being bulldozed backwards had shattered the walls of the cars, often bending them outwards enough that they caught the edges of the tunnel and were torn free. Thick boards and sheet metal had been tossed around like pickup sticks. Dozens of bodyparts and semi-intact corpses lay amidst the pulp from hundreds of dead mobs. Gold coins peeped out from among the wreckage, some of them twinkling in the light of Donut's Torch spell, the rest too blood-drenched to stand out until I accidentally kicked them. We gathered up as much of the gold as we could and I pulled the largest pieces of wreckage into my inventory so they wouldn't block the tracks.

There were indeed three dead bosses. One of them, Maza the Doun - Neighborhood Boss - Level 39, looked like a dolphin's body with four lion legs stapled on. What the head looked like I had no idea because it had been reduced to pulp in the destruction. Doun's map showed us the entire span of the Nightmare Express track and where the train was currently hurtling along.

Farther down the tunnel we found Squesm the Kampholt - Borough Boss - Level 57. It looked like a demonic narwhal covered in pustules, each of which contained a Doberman-sized spider. Its map gave us sight of fifty-three different stations that the Nightmare bypassed. They were disconnected points on the map, all of them lying within a dozen meters of the Nightmare's track but separated by solid rock and therefore unreachable. Still, it included the monster types at that station and the train lines that intersected there, making it priceless information.

Carl: Hey everybody. I'm sending this to everyone in my contact list. If any of you know how to drive a train, could you please DM me? Like, now? This thing's about to explode.

Donut: CARL, WHAT DID YOU DO?!

Carl: I may have overpressurized the boiler while trying to figure out the brakes.

Donut: CARL, WHAT HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT DYING AND LEAVING ME ALONE?! HONESTLY, I LET YOU OUT OF MY SIGHT FOR 5 MINUTES...

Carl: Hey, it wasn't intentional.

For the next five minutes I tried to reassure Donut that everything would definitely turn out fine because Carl was awesome. At the same time, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I tried to figure out what to do if things turned out not fine. She was having none of it; she was a pacing, whimpering ball of spikey fur and her fear was setting Mongo off so badly that we had to put him back in his cage. Fortunately, Carl found a solution in the strangest place.

Carl: Crisis averted, day saved. Also, this place is even more fucked up than we thought.

Carl: There's a woman in the boiler. Her name is Fire Brandy and she's a 'Lesser Demon MILF'. She's holygodthat'shuge pregnant and giving birth as we speak. Turns out that Lesser Demon MILFs are in labor for months, giving birth every few minutes. Most of the babies die a few seconds after being born, at which point they curl up into 'Sheol bricks'. It looks like very dense charcoal about the size and shape of a normal building brick. These things burn crazy hot.

Katia: You're saying that the trains run on...dead babies?

Carl: This one does. Hence 'fucked up'. Anyway, she taught me how to drive the train. I'm taking it really slow because I don't want to miss anything or, you know, explode. I'm pulling into 436 now. I'm going to get out and explore a bit.

We spent the next two hours clearing up the track and chatting with Carl as he explored station 436. The switches offered four options for how the Nightmare could leave station 436: On its own track, on a smorgasbord of colored-line tracks, through a train-sized portal labeled 'Repair Station', and through another train-sized portal labeled 'Recycle'. Carl's new Valtay implant allowed him to take mental pictures of what was on the other side of the portals and gave him information about the transfer process. None of the options were good.

Carl: Hello everyone. First, I'm not dead. I'm sending this out to everyone in my list and you should pass it on.

Carl: You probably know that the stairwells are at 12, 24, 36, 48, and 72 but we all started above that. I've found two ways to get back to those stations, plus two other possibilities.

Carl: Solution #1: If you equip that stupid hat we all got when we arrived on the level then you can just ride a train to the end of the line and you'll get through. Problem: The train car you're riding in won't get through; it gets dumped in a pit a couple kilometers wide and deep. Which means you'll be teleported into a train station that has literally thousands of zombies wandering around.

Carl: Solution #2: You can kill an engineer, get an engineer's key, and ride through in the engine car. You will be transported to the same station with the same zombies, but you'll still be inside the engine car. Problem: You'll have to manage to do that without crashing the train, but the only way we know to get the engineer to come out is to crash the train. You can possibly crash it, get the key, and then jump ahead using one of the named lines, but those named lines are a bitch. Also, we don't know what you can do after you get to the station. If you have control of the train you can possibly drive it out of there, but we're not sure.

Carl: Possible Solution #3: Station 435 on all the colored lines is where the employees get off. There's supposedly a portal there that takes you to the headquarters. I believe the headquarters is on the other side of a fence that will keep the zombies out. Problem: It sounds like there's a boss monster at the 435 stops called The Kravyad. Also, it appears if you go through this portal you lose time and memories. Plus we're not certain you can get through these portals. If someone tries this, let us know your experience.

Carl: Possible Solution #4: There's a portal labeled 'Repair Station' at 436. If you've got one of the hats or an engineer key then you can go through it, either on foot or in a train. There's a bunch of ghouls in a fenced-off area to one side, but I didn't see anything in the area where you'll actually arrive. I did see a train being lifted up, but no idea why or by what.

Carl: There are probably other solutions. If you find them, please put the word out. Good luck, and stay safe out there.