...Well, actually, Carl and Donut climbed aboard and I ruined the moment by almost tearing the ladder off the side. Apparently the rungs were not rated for 2900-kilogram people. Fortunately, Albert caught me before I did more than break one rung. He insisted on taking the opportunity to brag, out loud to me and over chat to Carl and Donut, about his 100,000 newtons of gravitic assist and the impressiveness thereof. He was also very clear about the fact that since I had equipped him and he was therefore inside me he could lighten me, and wasn't that the fastest weight-loss regimen ever? Personally, I cared about the part where he could reduce my weight enough that I could use the ladder without destroying anything.

Now we were steaming into Repair Station. The Train Baby's corpse had finished dissolving, but the army of ghouls who had previously been trapped behind the fence had broken through and spilled out into the wider station. The number of them was beyond my ability to comprehend; the station was easily three kilometers across and the crowd of ghouls extended from one side to the other. It was diffuse around the edges but in and around the repair bays the ghouls were packed shoulder-to-shoulder. A subtle Brownian motion in the crowd suggested that more were continuing to arrive from somewhere behind the administration building.

"That's a lot of ghouls, Carl," Donut said. "I mean, a lot of ghouls. I don't like this."

Fear ran through me like icewater and for a moment I couldn't move. The sheer malign hatred of the ghouls pressed in on me. We are going to rip your flesh off and eat you alive, they seemed to say.

Truthfully, I knew I was being ridiculous. I was in a modified version of my Battle Body: Birgit's hyperfetishized big-boobed body with its bladed purple mohawk, skintight leather paint and leather jacket with the cleavage, and my head and face sculpted out of polished dwarf steel. Metal mesh covered my mouth and eyes to provide electrical protection. My arms were three-meter whips covered in bladed spikes with scorpion stings on the ends. I had tried merging my toes into a single short spike in order to make kicks more lethal. Sadly, the AI didn't like the look so it counted it as unequipping my shoes. I quickly restored my feet's human appearance and the countdown was canceled. Fortunately, the AI hadn't minded when I shifted such that my feet, while still colored and shaped like human flesh, were actually made of nonconductive wood. I was as thoroughly not grounded as it was possible to be without wearing specialized equipment, and the ghouls were going to regret that.

Other problems had come up as well. I tried to pull all my flesh down into my torso, only to be told:

Error: At least one external mouth must be made of biological material.

Error: At least one external pair of eyes must be made of biological material.

I was definitely interested in the implication that I could have multiple eyes and mouths, and that it was possible to make them out of damage-resistant metal, but that was still on the TODO list for later.

For the final touch, I wore Albert.

Unlike all of my other gear, I could not freely reshape Albert. He was always a cylinder 50 centimeters long and anywhere from 10 to 250 centimeters in diameter. He could extend a very soft, very light fabric bag downwards up to 200 centimeters in order to provide additional cargo space. He could cap off his top and, when the bag was not extended, his bottom in that same indestructible plastic. None of that was under my control, but he responded instantly to any orders.

Right now his tube was embedded in my upper torso, reaching up through my neck and into my head, with the top cap on and my brain tucked safely inside. Mordecai had promised me that as I got better with my racial abilities I would be able to do away with having actual organs but for now I was stuck with needing at least a brain, heart, blood, and lungs. I could flatten my brain out without a problem, hence why I had been able to become a flat sheet when facing the Kickadas, but lungs and heart had to be roughly the normal shape in order to work properly. I could hold my breath for a long time—up to three minutes while fighting or twenty when not being too active—but eventually I had to reform them or suffocate. Ditto for the rest of my organs—I could do fine without kidneys or a liver for a couple hours but eventually they needed to be reformed or my health started going down. Although, my organs needed to be contiguous with the rest of me, hence why I couldn't put my brain inside Albert and cap both ends.

I shook those thoughts away and made myself focus. My brain was running off on irrelevant tangents, trying not to think about what we were facing. The plan had been to steam into the station, switch the train onto the Beach Heather line, hook up four of the three dozen passenger cars that were parked on the siding, climb back aboard, and steam out of there on the first leg of our effort to save lives.

That plan was out the window.

There was a slight turn at the end of the tunnel, so we hadn't been able to see the ghouls until the last minute. Carl had jammed on the brakes in a desperate attempt to prevent us from getting into their line of sight but it was too late; by the time the Rescue Rail stopped we were in the station and surrounded.

Carl pushed the throttle forward and we started accelerating slowly, plowing through ghouls who weren't fast enough or smart enough to get off the tracks.

"Stop, Carl!" Donut said. "They've blocked the tracks!"

Sure enough, some especially large and smart ghouls were busily tearing up the track a few dozen meters ahead of us. Carl leaned on the brakes and the train started slowing down.

"We can't stay here," he said, far more calmly than seemed reasonable to me. "If we can turn that switch"—he pointed ahead at a metal pole with the number 4189 standing next to our track—"we can bypass the damaged section. The switches at station 436 could be changed with a pole from inside the train, but that one looks like it needs to be controlled from the stationmaster's office." He hooked a thumb towards the repair bays and the squat concrete building beyond them.

My stomach sank. That was over a kilometer away.

"Why can't we just back up?" Donut asked. A ghoul climbed onto the front of the train and she blasted it with a Magic Missile, crushing its head and knocking its body back to tangle up the ones behind it.

"Because if they were smart enough to rip the track ahead of us then they probably did the same behind us," Carl said. "Katia, I'm going to drop some low-powered explosives to give you a clear spot. Formation three. We cut our way to the stationmaster's office, flip the switch, and get out."

Formation three meant a wedge shape with me in the middle, Mongo behind and to my left, and Carl behind and to my right with Donut on his shoulder. I was expected to lead the way against a literal army of ghouls.

*You'll do fine, ma'am,* Albert wrote on the lower part of my field of vision. *You're incredibly heavily armored. You can kill these ghouls just by stepping on them, and Carl and Donut have your back.*

"Katia?" Carl asked, eyeing the oncoming horde nervously. "If those things make it onto the train, we're cooked."

Be Birgit, be Birgit.

I took a breath and pasted a smile on my face, hoping that I looked more 'confident and badass' and less 'terrified and about to puke.'

"Time to dance," I said, repeating the superheroine's catchphrase as I flicked an exaggeratedly casual salute.

"Go get 'em, Katia!" Donut said. "You've got this! Right, Carl?"

"Sure. Clearing charges in three, two, one, now." He tossed an eighth stick of dynamite out the left and right windows of the train's engine car.

*Go!*

I couldn't move. Birgit was too far away. A catchphrase, yes, but jumping into that sea of rage and death?

"Go, ma'am!" Albert said in my ear. "Go, go, go!"

I opened the door of the train and jumped out before I could change my mind.

I dropped two meters and sank into the ground up to my ankles. It ruined my entrance and robbed me of the literal and figurative momentum that would have allowed me to control the engagement against the charging ghouls.

I hurriedly kicked one foot free but that required shifting my weight to the other foot, which drove that foot deeper and left me sunk up to my right knee. The ghouls were happy to take advantage of my discomfiture. They charged, smashing themselves against me and bearing me over onto my back, their claws scrabbling furiously across my body. They were ripping into my steel, not deeply but each slash was enough to shave off a few points of health and there were dozens of them piling on top of me. I had managed to get my arms up to cover my face but that simply meant that I couldn't use them to attack.

"Numb exec," I said, covering my face with both arms. "Carl! Clearing charge!"

Awareness of my body vanished as Albert turned off all sensation. There was a loud sound, presumably that of Carl dropping a hob-lobber fuse on me. The explosive was small enough not to damage me very much through all my metal but large enough to blow everything within three meters to mulch. Meanwhile, I imagined my right lower leg turning to taffy and melting back into my thigh, and tried to tell my vanished body to duplicate that mental image. A moment later I imagined it re-forming itself, except pointing straight instead of bending down into the hole. "Cancel numb, please."

Sensation flooded back and I could tell that yes, my leg had obeyed my commands even though I hadn't been able to feel the change. The leg was three centimeters too long, but that was easy enough to fix with only a little discomfort.

"Katia, are you okay?!" Donut shouted from above me.

"Fine!" I climbed back to my feet and moved forward, embarrassment and fear turning to anger. The ghouls came at me in a rush.

Ghoul. Level 19.

Well, that wasn't going to be a problem. Not now that I wasn't stuck in the ground and unable to move.

A roar split the air and something pushed its way through the crowd, shoving its smaller brethren aside in its haste. Someone had taken a regular ghoul and scaled it up from 160 centimeters to 260 and proportionally wider. The claws had gone from one-centimeter knives to thirty-centimeter sickles and the teeth had obviously grown so fast that they erupted out of its face, tearing through the lips and cheeks in the process. Its eyes were wild and dripped blood.

Wrath Ghoul. Level 31.

Okay, that was going to be a problem.

I aimed myself towards the repair bays and activated my Rush ability; it catapulted me forward like I'd been fired from a cannon. My Constitution and health surged in time with my momentum, but I ignored that and focused on whipping my arms back and forth in 180-degree arcs in front of myself. The nearly three tons of mass I was carrying gave me a Strength boost and basic physics did the rest; I literally tore ghouls in half with every strike of my arm, including the Wrath Ghoul. The ones that were unfortunate enough to actually be struck by my body were converted directly into salsa.

"You're doing brilliantly, ma'am!" Albert said as the Rush ended and I dropped back to normal speed. "Hah! Come at us, you stupid mobs! I fart in your general direction!"

"It's nice of you to try to lead me to the answer instead of nagging me, but you could just say 'Remember to practice your Taunt spell'," I said wryly.

"Permission to make a joke, ma'am?"

I laughed, bowing sharply so that my mohawk split a ghoul from crown to clavicle, then tossed my head to throw him to the side. "You're going to say 'where's the fun in that', aren't you?"

"Curses, I am anticipated!"

I laughed again. The armor and preparations and training were working. I was destroying ghouls with the slightest touch, crushing them like bugs and ignoring their feeble attacks in return. The relief from fear buoyed me up like champagne and for a moment I reveled in the power of it. The ghouls shrieked and shouted and threatened but they were jokes. Less dangerous than my four-year-old niece's tickle-pounces except she would never do that again because those bastards at Borant had crushed her.

Rage burst forth at the thought that Viktoria would never pounce me again. My instinctive reaction was to quell the rage, maintain proper decorum...and then I realized I didn't need to.

I screamed my fury, my hatred for everything that Borant was and had done, and I spun a full circle, allowing my arms to trail around in a double whip that pulped and tore and smashed. There was a loud sound from behind me and I ignored it so that I could leap forward onto a group of three Wrath Ghouls who were trying to marshal a collection of regular ghouls into a coordinated attack. I kicked the first one in the belly with the spike of my stiletto heel and almost fell on my nose when my foot didn't stop the way I expected. Hundreds of kilos of steel in the leg powered by a superhuman Strength score and concentrated into what was effectively a blunted spear point? My foot went in through his belly and out through his spine. I stumbled forward instead of back and ended up dropping to one knee on his chest. He splurtched, more blood soaking me, but I stood up and kicked my foot forward and out of his chest before charging towards the next Wrath Ghoul because they were more satisfying to kill than the weak ones and there was a spitting yowl from behind me and something that sounded like words but I flung my arms, whipping more ghouls because they were the closest thing I could get to Borant, to those evil. Fucking. BASTARDS who killed my family and there were more over there and I rushed to them and killed those and the next and the next and the world was red in fury and death but I didn't care—

Carl: KATIA! Snap out of it! We're at the bay and we're cut off!