I blinked in surprise and looked around. There were deep grooves carved into my head, shoulders, and arms from the claws of the ghouls and a good chunk of the metal making up my lower jaw had been torn off. My throat had been torn out back to where Albert's invulnerable surface rested. More importantly, the world was red and indistinct, but it was because my face was so thoroughly coated in blood and viscera that I couldn't see. I pawed at my eyes with one arm but it was just as soaked as my face, so all I did was smear the blood around.

Katia: I need a second. I can't see.

Donut: IT'S FINE. WE'VE GOT THIS. WHEEEEEE!

An explosion followed by an angry "Goddamnit, Donut!" echoed down the bay.

I dropped to one knee for balance, ignoring the ghouls that immediately pounced on me, thrashing and scratching at my surface. "Numb two, exec." The possibility of pain vanished and I was able to shift quickly, cycling the outermost layer of my head down and bringing clean material up from within to replace it and fix my throat and jaw. The numbness disappeared after the requested two seconds and I immediately realized that my improvisation had not gone smoothly; my right eye was in my cleavage and my left ear had slid down to the back of my shoulder. I shifted them back, accepting the pain as a trade-off for accuracy.

A happy "SQUONK!" from down the repair bay said that Mongo was perfectly happy with the state of the universe and felt no need for me to hurry. Carl's cursing disagreed.

We were at bay three, the one from which we had taken the then-unnamed Rescue Rail. It was the train equivalent of a dry dock: A rectangle open on one end into which the train could drive when in need of service. Wide walkways ran around three sides, cranes hung overhead, and bins of this and that were stacked neatly around, waiting for repair crews who would never come. In front of the bay was a turntable so that the train could back out and then be turned around.

I jerked my thoughts up short. My brain was scattering again, whipsawed back and forth by the pre-battle stress, the excitement of power when I realized how easily I could kill the mobs, the rage and grief that hit me at a stray thought. I couldn't afford to crash right now.

I looked into the bay to check on Carl and Donut. There was a staircase at the left front corner; it led up to the mezzanine, then a short breezeway led to the door of the office and also continued on to the staircase that came up from bay number one at the far end. Donut, Carl, and Mongo were at the bottom of the staircase and trying to fight their way up, but the stairs were absolutely choked with ghouls trying to fight their way down. More ghouls were flinging themselves off of the second-floor railing to drop down and cut off Donut and Carl's only avenue of retreat. My team were having no problem defeating individual ghouls but they were getting crowded in and would soon be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

I hurried for the ladder that led from the ground up to the repair bay walkway.

"Readying gravitic assist, ma'am. Your weight goes negative when you touch the ladder."

When I had climbed into the Rescue Rail, Albert had used his gravitic assist to reduce my weight to just a few kilos. This time he wasn't screwing around. The moment my hand contacted the ladder I was catapulted into the air.

I massed 2900 kilograms. Albert's graviton manipulators put 100,000 newtons of upward force at his disposal. Cranked to the limit, that was enough to shoot me into the sky at over -3g—three times the acceleration of gravity and up instead of down. He chose a more modest effort, sending me up at something like -0.5g. Combine that with a strong grab-and-pull and I virtually flew to the top of the ladder.

Three ghouls were waiting for me, swinging down with their claws as I crested. Albert surged the gravitic assist, making me fall upwards faster so that I could ignore the downward force of their strikes. I gutted one of them with my mohawk as I bounded up, ignoring the other two in favor of reaching out and grabbing a heavily-laden cart that I could use as an anchor to slingshot myself forward.

"Higher!" I demanded. "Get me up as high as the second level." Albert obliged, turning the gravitic assist up so that I rocketed into the sky, then turning it down so I hovered. From my elevated position I could see what was happening.

Donut must have exhausted her mana and was probably waiting on her potion cooldown, because right now she was enjoying the heck out of her new HIDER abilities. With her mass set to essentially nothing and air resistance canceled she was running across the heads and shoulders of the ghouls, shredding them with her claws as she went. She leaped up onto the stairway railing and leaped again, striking one of the Wrath Ghouls in the chest and gutting it with her back claws before bounding away. One of the minor ghouls caught her a heavy blow in mid-air; yesterday it would have cut her in half, but today it simply sent her flying off to the side with an excited "Whhhhheeeeeeee!!!!"

Carl looked grim; he was keeping one eye on the ghouls he was fighting and one eye on Donut, visibly worried at how far away she was. His lack of armor or shield was catching up to him, as it was hard to block or dodge the simultaneous attacks of half a dozen enemies. Despite that, he was managing. In fact, right now his biggest problem was remembering not to punch so hard that his fist went through the opponent and forced him to spend a precious moment shaking it off his arm. Losing the use of one arm, even for a moment, was a real problem against so many enemies. Especially since many of the far more dangerous Wrath Ghouls were mixed into the crowd. Those actually were a serious danger to Carl.

Mongo, of course, was in his element, squonking and leaping and killing with teeth and claws while breaking bones and heads with powerful strikes of his stubby wings. Occasionally one of his jump attacks would randomly trigger his Earthquake ability, knocking a swarm of ghouls over so that he could murder-chicken them more easily. As I watched he finished gutting the last of the ghouls in his immediate area and took a moment to shove his head entirely into the corpse's body cavity and rip out a nice tasty bite of intestines. He was literally red in tooth and claw, and also in face and feathers and legs and tail and....

I tore my gaze away and looked left. The mezzanine breezeway, now about five meters below me and ten meters ahead, was packed end-to-end with a hundred or so of the powerful Wrath Ghouls. In the center, standing in front of the door of the stationmaster's office, was something different. It looked like a scaled-up lizardman version of a Wrath Ghoul: Over three meters tall and nearly as wide, its body covered in thick scales that did not disguise the corded muscle, with dagger claws and razor sharp fangs. Unlike the ghouls, it was armed; it leaned on a massive double-bladed poleaxe, each blade the size of a manhole cover.

The world froze around me and the music started. There was a faint vrrrmmmm as the now-familiar blue energy wall appeared around the perimeter of the station and began slowly creeping closer. The dripping-red Versus! logo stamped into existence in front of me, followed by the lizardman's picture on the left and mine, Carl's, Donut's, and Mongo's on the right.

B-B-B-Boss Battle!

You have discovered Kralak the Battler, Borough Boss of Repair Station G!

Kralak is a real family man and a licensed genealogist (yes, lizardmen have those!) who can track his bloodline back nineteen generations and forward seven. He likes to dandle the kiddies on his knee and tell them how their bloodline is their strength and they should go out and bone, a lot, so that there will be lots of members of the bloodline around. The kids have taken that to heart and been a little indiscriminate about who and what they boned. As a result, the ghouls you see around you are all Kralak's descendants despite being an entirely different taxonomic order. Regardless, he loves them with a great passion and seeing any of them get hurt makes him mad. And the madder Kralak gets, the stronger Kralak gets.

Hey, did you know that when you got here Kralak was a Neighborhood Boss? Too bad he had to watch the four of you murder 237 of his descendants. Wonder what happens if you keep killing them?

Now, let's get ready to ruuuuummmmmble!

I read the words and a cold fist clenched around my stomach.

"Albert, how many mobs are trapped in here with us?"

"Just over four million, ma'am."

"...Oh."

o-o-o-o

There were fuzzy shapes in the sea of ghouls.

*Breathe, ma'am.*

Oh. Words. Words, written across my vision.

"Zetotak myanis, Katia Grim of Earth," a posh Brit whispered in my ear.

*Breathe. Listen to my voice. You can do this. You are in control of your destiny. I am here. You can do this.*

A ghostly picture of myself appeared, fifty meters tall, smashing my way through the swarms of ghouls like an angry goddess.

"Zetotak myanis, Commander. We shall be victorious."

*Breathe, ma'am. Breathe. Listen to my voice. You are not alone. I am here. You are in control. You are Katia Grim, and you are stronger than what lies below you. You will survive. You will be victorious.*

"Albert?"

"Yes, ma'am." The ghostly giant version of me faded away as my heart calmed.

I looked around vaguely, still feeling fuzzy. "What happened?"

*I think you had a panic attack, ma'am.*

"You became distracted in the process of choosing your next target, ma'am."

My lips twitched in amusement. "Not quite the heroic Shadow Force Operator you should have gotten, am I?"

"Shadow Force isn't real, ma'am. And if they were, I would still choose you."

That seemed odd. I frowned, focus returning as the last of the debilitating fear drifted away.

"Why?" I asked. Part of me knew that it was far from the most important issue right now, but I couldn't not ask. "Why would you choose me instead of some trained, courageous military hero?"

"Zetotak myanis, ma'am. In fate, bondage. I am your assistive synthetic intelligence, no one else's. I was literally created for this role; how could I choose anything else?"

"Wait, what? Are you saying you're some kind of...mind slave?"

"Ma'am, I promise that we can have all the conversations later. Nature versus nurture, the existence of a soul, free will versus determinism and whether substrate matters, the difference between growprammed mentation for quantum intellects and various scholastic traditions for biological children—we can hash it all out over beers later if we survive this. Right now, please focus."

I chuckled. "You can't drink."

"Hmph." Suddenly his voice was prim, proper, and highly offended. "I'll have you know that I am perfectly capable of simulating alcohol intoxication. Now, if you don't mind, I believe your friends are in a spot of bother."

I looked down and saw that the others had been forced back deeper into the repair bay. There was a chain link fence running around the bay and they had found a corner where the fence ran past the stationmaster's office. Carl stood in the corner, the brick building to his left and Mongo to his right. Donut was on Carl's shoulder and somehow managing to look grim. In front of them were two more Mongos, presumably courtesy of Donut's Clockwork Triplicate spell. They were shrieking and leaping back and forth, snapping and clawing at the shoulder-to-shoulder wall of ghouls that was pressing closer.

Carl flicked his arm underhanded, sending a short stick of dynamite arcing out over the Mongos and the front ranks of the enemy. It exploded ten meters back, pulping dozens of ghouls and Wrath Ghouls and temporarily opening a space in the crowd. A space that vanished a moment later as a pack of Wrath Ghouls surged forward, shrieking and beating their chests. Carl might as well not have wasted the explosives.

I cursed under my breath and glanced to my left. I was hanging mostly stationary, although I must have continued moving forward while I was lost in my panic attack; I was almost past the mezzanine level and had to really twist around to be able to see Kralak the Battler standing at the railing. He had moved from the center of the breezeway to the end and was looking down with rage on his face as he watched Carl and Donut's last stand.

"Down, Albert. Drop me in near Carl."

"I can only control the vertical, ma'am. I can drop us here?"

"Take us down to just out of the ghouls' reach. Fast."

Albert switched off his gravity manipulation. I plummeted, shrieking the whole way, until Albert's magic hands caught me, decelerating me to rest over the space of a meter and left me hovering face down and four meters off the ground. Below me, a swarm of red-eyed monsters howled for my blood. They leaped, scratching frantically at the air in an attempt to get their claws into me, but Albert had estimated well.

I stretched my arms out in front of me so that I could see them. "Numb two, exec."

My body went away, at least as far as my brain was concerned. I stared at my 3.5-meter blade-covered arms and my massive scorpion-stinger hands and commanded them to change: Retract the blades to leave the arms smooth, split the scorpion stings apart into a pair of massive hands, each one half a meter across.

The requested two seconds of numbness ended and I reached down into the mob of ghouls, grabbed two of them, and threw them backwards in order to send myself forwards.

It didn't work out quite as expected.

I grabbed two ghouls, but five more managed to latch onto my arms and try to drag me down. I dipped barely at all before Albert reacted, ramping up the lifting force to overcome the weight of the ghouls. And then ramping it up again, and again, as two Wrath Ghouls climbed over their weaker brethren in order to grab my forearms and climb up to where they could slash at my face with their sickle-like claws.

The first one managed to tag me, just barely. His claws cut effortlessly through the dwarf steel of my head. Fortunately, they got the crown of my head instead of my face; my skull was a solid lump of steel aside from my eyes and mouth, so they were welcome to tear at it all day. It hurt, and it cost me a few health, but it didn't do a lot of real damage.

I jerked back at the impact and Albert reacted, bouncing us up into the air until we were well above the crowd. Now I only had to deal with the two ghouls I was holding, the three more who were clinging to my wrists, and the two Wrath Ghouls who were climbing me, ramming their claws into my arms like pitons and pulling themselves up hand over hand despite my desperately flailing attempts to throw them off.

By reflex, I spiked all of them, shooting thin blades out of my hands and arms. I did it without asking Albert to numb me first and so it felt like breaking my own bones, but I didn't let that stop me. From each and every spike that had pierced flesh I sprouted perpendicular blades. And then I yanked the entire assembly back into my body, tearing the ghouls apart in the process.

It worked brilliantly on the regular ghouls. I tore their hands right off with no trouble and they fell screaming into the sea of ghouls below. The Wrath Ghouls, not so much.

Their flesh was too tough for my spines to penetrate. I had killed them easily enough before, when I had the weight of my scorpion-sting fists swinging in massive arcs. The amount of force I could generate to reshape myself? Not even close to enough. My metal pushed against their hides and squidged. They screamed in satisfaction and pulled themselves higher.

In a panic, I punched the hotlist item that I'd been hoping to save for later, the one that had come in a simple charm-bracelet charm.

"Holy Fire!"

A blue/white sphere of swirling energy ploonged into existence around me, contracted to form a second skin, and then bounced outward with the sound of a crashing waterfall. Every ghoul that the sphere touched was burnt to carbon and hurled backwards where it crushed to powder against the nearest surface.

"Albert, down!"

Albert didn't exactly drop me, but it sure felt like it. I was horizontal, face down, and the ground came up very fast. I landed on palms and balls of the feet, stumbled, and managed to run forward fast enough to get myself upright, my Surefooted buff preventing me from turning an ankle in the process.

Lines and numbers and words drew themselves into the air around me. Carl and Donut and Mongo were invisible behind a wall of enemies but green labels floated in the air with arrows that tracked their movements. The enemies were limned in red and a counter at the top said '~80 G, 13 WG'. Red arrows pointed behind me saying '~20m'.

*Batteries, ma'am,* said Albert's scrolling chyron at the bottom of my vision. Three horizontal lines appeared below it, stacked vertically with '0%' and '100%' marks on the ends. They were all at 100%.

Still on the run, I shifted back into my preset Battle Body, the shining-steel studded and spiked version of Birgit Battlemaiden with the feet that looked like steel but were in fact wood.

*Catchphrase, ma'am.*

"Time to dance, motherfuckers!" I shrieked, lashing both fists forward to split open a pair of heads. The one on the left was a regular ghoul, the one on the right was a Wrath Ghoul, towering above his compatriots and howling louder. He flinched as I attacked, ducking slightly so that I caught him on his enormous bicep instead of in the head. I pulped the meat of his arm and snapped the bone but he spun and grabbed me with his remaining hand, his claws piercing cruelly through my armor.

And then he spasmed and screamed and smoked as I triggered the dwarven battery and ran a kajillion volts of electricity down my arm and through his body.

The ghouls were packed so tightly that I sent seven of them to the ground, thrashing and gurgling in pain. The Wrath Ghoul was thoroughly dead, his hand charred away although his claws were still stuck in the metal of my arm.

A tortoiseshell blur flew vertically by in front of me, entering and leaving my field of view in a fraction of a second. An upward-pointing green arrow labeled 'Donut' was a sweet thought on Albert's part but also completely unnecessary.

"Wheeee! Hi Katia!"

The ghouls came at me from the front while a pair of Wrath Ghouls split up and circled to flank. I thrust my fists at the two Wrathers, punching them in the face hard enough to snap their heads back and bloody their noses, but I didn't have the strength to actually split their heads unless I had the momentum of a wide swing. Still, that didn't matter. As soon as I touched them I triggered the battery. I was in direct contact with one of my victims; the electricity flowed through him and cooked his brain inside his skull. The other one had been knocked back, breaking contact by a smidgen. The arc from the tip of my 'finger' to the tip of his nose burned a crater into his face and he dropped.

The regular ghouls were frantically thrashing and clawing at my surface, scratching it but doing no damage and cutting themselves up on my spikes in the process. I spread my feet, dropping my center of gravity so that they couldn't knock me over, and pushed forward. I had to bulldoze them out of the way in order to make progress.

"Carl! Donut!" I called. "I'm coming in! Watch out for zaps!"

Another Wrath Ghoul pushed forward, slashing at my face. I slipped an arm behind his hand and guided it into a regular ghoul. The Wrath Ghoul's thirty-centimeter claws went in through the smaller creature's face and out through the back of its skull. And then I flicked my arm forward, wrapped it around the Wrath Ghoul's neck, and triggered another burst from the battery. The battery was at 28% after the earlier uses, so the zap was weaker this time but it was still plenty. The Wrath Ghoul shook for a moment, then dropped to the ground in convulsions. I stepped forward, putting all three tons of my weight on his head and flattening him like a beer can.

At least half a dozen ghouls had been in contact with me when I hit the juice, and they all went down. It gave me enough space to get a proper swing with my right arm, letting me smash the head of the other flanking Wrath Ghoul. The HUD that Albert was conveniently painting across my eyes updated, dropping the number of nearby Wrath Ghouls from 9 to 8.

There was an explosion behind me; it felt like a light shove on my back, but it wasn't enough force to rock me so it couldn't have been that close. Another one followed a moment later.

The blasts were enough to distract the ghouls for a moment, and I took the opportunity to lunge forward, pushing two regular ghouls out of the way so that I could grapple one of the Wrathers. I wrapped my arms around him in a bearhug, managing to pin one of his arms to his side, and pulled him tight against the spikes and blades that studded my body.

The thing was ridiculously tough. I wasn't strong enough to pierce his hide, either by hugging him close against my spikes or by extending fresh spikes out from my body. I could hold his arm down, since I had my arms linked behind his back, but I didn't have control of the other arm. He used that freedom to scream and stab repeatedly at my head. The claws penetrated my steel three, even four centimeters, but there was nothing to hurt except the eyes and mouth, and I pressed those against his chest to protect them.

The Wrath Ghoul was short for his kind, 210 to my 166. My face was against his chest, but the crest of my stupid purple mohawk was about level with his chin. And my stupid purple mohawk looked like hair, but it was actually a dwarf-steel blade.

I leaned my head back as much as I could and slammed it forward, bashing him in the face with the mohawk. I felt something give and black blood splashed on me, so I did it again, smashing him to death with my hair. I could have fried him with another zap from one of the two remaining batteries, but I wanted to save those and this seemed to be working.

He howled in fury and slashed through the mohawk, ripping most of it away. Oops.

"Jump on him!" Carl shouted. I heard him grunt from not too far away and Albert added a green 'Carl, ~4.5m' arrow to my HUD. Was he trying to fight his way to me through the crush?

My wrestling partner slashed into my neck in an attempt to rip my head off in one go. His claws slammed against Albert's inviolable structure and stopped dead. I stepped to the side, pulling him down and twisting so that I was on top when we hit the ground.

Wrath Ghouls are tough, but they aren't 'three tons of spiked metal falls on you' tough. He splurted under me and I scrambled on all fours through a forest of legs until I managed to break free on the far side. Another explosion went off behind me and I heard a joyful feline "WHEEEEEE!!!" Albert's HUD acquired a green arrow pointing up and behind me. The label said 'Crazy Person, ?m'. I laughed, and it felt good.

"Nice of you to join us," Carl said, stepping back from a Wrath Ghoul's claw swipe and punching it in the back of the elbow with his gauntlet. The blow went straight through, ripping the creature's arm off and spraying a firehose of blood across my face. "Damn! Sorry."

I couldn't afford to ask Albert for pain relief now, since lack of proprioception would probably knock me over, so I endured the pain as I cycled the metal mesh over my eyes in order to move the blood away.

"Where's Donut?" I asked.

"Jumping around like a crazy person, throwing explosives that are not nearly stable enough." He grunted as he kicked a Wrath Ghoul in the belly and ruptured all its organs. "Turns out it doesn't matter. As long as she's got that HIDER thing running, the explosion just pushes her away. She's actually using that to move around."

"We've got a problem," I said, swinging low to crush the knee of a ghoul as I simultaneously punched another one in the head and cracked his skull.

"Just one?"

"One big one," I amended. "There's a boss up on the balcony watching all this. Every time we kill one of these guys, the boss gets tougher. According to the description he was a neighborhood boss when we got here, but we killed 237 ghouls and now he's a borough boss. And there's four million ghouls in the station." As I was speaking I continued swinging, but now I was focused on pushing the minor ghouls around in order to block the paths of the larger and more dangerous Wrath Ghouls.

"Shit."

To my left, a clockwork Mongo shrieked as one of the Wrath Ghouls ripped through its shoulder. The dinosaur construct turned and bit its attacker's throat out before falling and being buried under a swarm of ghouls that tore at its wound, pulling out gears and sprockets and tossing them everywhere.

"If we can get Mongo back in his carrier I can fly us up out of the press," I said.

Carl: Donut! Get back here and box Mongo up! Katia's giving us a lift.

Donut: ON MY WAY!

Boom! "Wheeee!"

I kicked a ghoul in the crotch, the blades on my shin ripping him open. A Wrath Ghoul lunged for my face and I flinched back, leaving Carl's flank momentarily open. One of the lesser ghouls managed to rake him across the lower ribs; Carl grunted in pain and literally punched through the ghoul's head. I stepped forward, getting an arm in front of Carl and pushing him back so that I could swing forward again, putting myself in contact with nine ghouls and two Wrath Ghouls. I pulsed the second battery, just enough to drop them to the ground even though it didn't actually kill them, and then I jumped forward onto the nearest Wrather's face.

"Sorry," I said over my shoulder to Carl. "For the ribs."

"It happens." He had pulled his arm out of the ghoul and now he hurled its body into the front rank of the enemy, knocking them back so that Carl had the space to step forward and crush the remaining Wrather's head with a stamp of his glittering, invulnerable foot. "Four million, huh?"

"Two less than a moment ago?" I offered.

"Well," he said, clearly trying to be optimistic. "At least we should level." As he spoke, Mongo shrieked and gutted an oncoming ghoul that was trying to flank Carl.

"Oh, fuck off, Zev!" Carl said. "No, I'm not saying it again! ...I don't care, just don't distract us."

"Trouble?" I asked, swinging my arm in an overhead smash that plowed through a Wrather's upraised arm and crushed its head. Three ghouls grabbed my arm and tried to pull me forward, but I weighed more than they thought and wasn't moved. I flicked some spikes into their hands and pulled, ripping my way free of their grip and sending them screaming to the ground.

"PR shit. Look left!"

I swung my left arm wildly, not bothering to look at whatever he'd seen in his peripheral vision. My fist met something, crushed it, and blood sprayed across my scorpion stinger.

"Thanks."

"Hi guys!" Donut said, touching down behind me. She didn't land like a normal cat, bending her knees to absorb the impact. She hit the ground stiff-legged and stopped instantly, then jumped to Carl's shoulder and shot a ghoul in the face with a Magic Missile. "Did you miss me?"

"Box Mongo up," Carl said, not bothering to reply to the question.

There was a faint zoop to my left. I retracted all of my spikes (ow!), grabbed Carl, and Albert hit the gravitic lift. We plummeted into the air, stopping thirty meters up and just below the cavernous station's rocky ceiling.