As it happened, they did have some strong people in the group. There were four brothers who had all opted to be Coal Engines, massive rock creatures with molten centers. There was a misisti, a four-meter amoeba covered in meter-long prehensile hair who could exert massive amounts of hydraulic pressure and had the Strength stat to match. There were two fairy-type creatures with powerful telekinesis, one as a racial ability and one from a pair of wing sheaths he'd gotten from a Platinum loot box. Others had simply focused their builds on melee damage, funneling most or all of their stat points into Strength. There were 623 crawlers here; a third of them had strength far beyond that of mortal men through one means or another.

All told, it was easily enough to lift a 65-ton passenger train car and walk off with it. Which was precisely what we did.

Of course, it wasn't actually easy. The train cars were 25 meters long, 3 meters wide, and 4 meters high from the ground. Like most of the other tracks, the Byzantium line was sized for the trains, leaving only a dozen centimeters above and to the sides, with perhaps half a meter from the undercarriage to the track ties. There was no room to turn or angle the car, so we had to spend two hours widening the hole in the wall between the Beach Heather and Byzantium lines to be as long as a train car, which took the rest of Carl's explosives plus a dozen other people's carefully hoarded resources. Once the hole was wide enough we uncoupled the last car on the Byzantium line, carried it through the wall, and hooked it up to the Rescue Rail.

We did that ten times.

At Donut's prompting, Carl stayed in the background and let me take the lead. I maintained my stripper-Birgit persona throughout, smiling and joking and flaunting my 'assets' and doing my best to be the Birgit Battlemaiden that I had read about in so many comics when I was a teen. Albert helped immeasurably, populating the air around people's heads with factoids about them that I could drop into conversation, and even the occasional suggestion on something to say or ask. It worked: People smiled when I talked to them and didn't find a reason to leave as soon as possible.

It took seven hours to shift the ten train cars. Two hours into that process, the Good Rest buff that Carl, Donut, and I got from sleeping in the magic beds wore off. All three of us nearly fell over as a wave of exhaustion crashed over us. We retreated to the Rescue Rail engine and napped for a few hours while everyone else did the work. Sleeping on the hard floor of a train engine wasn't particularly restful and when I woke up I felt stumble-tongued and awkward. We took a few minutes to reset our buffs—Carl pedicured himself, I ate metal and brushed Donut—and then we pasted on smiles and went back out there to be social. Somehow, mostly due to a lot of teleprompting from Albert, I got through it without anyone actually saying anything about my lack of grace and confidence.

During that time, Carl, Donut, and I ensured that we had fistbumped all of our rescuees in order to get them into our chat lists. I also convinced as many of them as I could to give me a summary of their abilities so that Albert could start creating plans; I was surprised at the number of people who had no worries about revealing such personal information given that player killers were a thing.

We were working on the eighth car when the frag snails arrived.

Fortunately, multiple people had the neighborhood map for the Byzantium line and had been able to watch the bad guys coming, so we were prepared. We only needed to defend a front the width of the tunnel—a little over three meters. We didn't want to damage the tracks so we didn't dig the moat suggested by a crawler named Yvette whose Construction Foreman class gave her abilities oriented around digging and building. Instead, we built an abattis out of pointy stuff from a few dozen people's inventories, followed by no less than six separate chest-high walls. Our melee types with reach weapons stood behind the first wall, ranged fighters knelt on the second wall, and more ranged fighters stood on the third. Healers were sprinkled in throughout to ensure that everyone stayed topped up on health. If the fighting got too hot then we could leapfrog back a line and start over with fresh defenders.

The frag snails ranged from sixty to eighty centimeters high with shells comprised of insanely thick armor that covered their top, sides, back, and the upper half of their front. They mostly moved at a relaxed amble although they could produce a burst of cheetah-like speed over a distance of three or four meters. The ground smoked caustic fumes from the toxic secretions they left in their wake. If the snails were killed, or if their armor was breached, they exploded and scattered acidic body parts and razor-sharp shell fragments everywhere. This would occasionally kill a neighboring snail which would in turn explode. Regardless, the fragments of snail flesh promptly started regenerating into new snails. They were quiescent for ten-ish seconds, developed a shell over the next thirty, and swelled back to full size over the next minute. One explosion resulted in ten to twenty new snails.

It was a good thing that we had time to prepare; if we had met them with anything less than we did then we would have had blinded defenders screaming in pain from acid burns while snails grew throughout their midst. As it was, we saw the explosions and regenerations at a distance when Li Bao, a Stellar Fulminator with massive but slow ranged attacks, lobbed his first starball into the midst of the snails tangled up in the abattis. By the time they reached the walls we had thinned their ranks substantially, everyone had some sort of shield to protect their face from the acid, and we had fast-moving members of the team in position to snatch up and inventory all the snail fragments before they could regenerate—apparently they didn't count as living until they had finished regrowing their shell.

After a time it became a bit of a game. People were given one minute to kill as many snails as they could, then they had to step back and let someone else farm XP. A leaderboard was kept, bets were made, and laughter began to take the place of terror.

I took my turn when the chance came. Most of the other melee types focused on moving as quickly as possible, delivering as many blows as they could within their 60-second time limit. I took a different approach: I used a chunk of railroad tie to sweep a dozen snails together, then I smashed one of them and let the explosion chain-fire the rest. I was good-naturedly accused of cheating and unfair tactics. I was also clapped on the back in comradely fashion and offered a beer. I didn't end up winning the pool but I did well enough to earn respect.

o-o-o-o

Eventually we finished shifting ten passenger cars over to the Beach Heather line and getting everyone loaded. There had been much discussion about whether we would need to put some of the larger crawlers, such as the four Coal Engines and the misisti, on the flatbeds so that we could fit more people in the passenger cars. In the end it turned out to be unnecessary; with ten passenger cars there was plenty of room for everyone, although we did have to cut the doors wider in order for our larger members to get inside. We took a headcount (made much easier by Albert's image processing prowess) and then we set off to rescue the group from station 184, who were now waiting for us at 181, a transfer station with a Desperado Club.

Roberto, Jean, and Ivan rode in the engine car with me and Carl and Donut. The three of them were the unofficial leaders of the massive army that we had rescued. We spent the first hour making the dungeon equivalent of small talk: Where were you when the world ended? Killed anything interesting lately? Got any useful abilities that will let us kill stuff better? You know, the usual.

Honestly, I had a good time. I hadn't been a social lion back before the dungeon. I was the second-youngest of five and somehow all the good genes had ended up in the siblings. My oldest sister, the Olympic diver. My second-oldest sister, the geothermal engineer with a third-degree black belt. My older brother, who made a living from royalties on his landscape photography and ran a soup kitchen. My youngest brother, who—

I felt myself tearing up and pushed the thoughts away.

I hadn't been the social one. I was shy and quiet and didn't have a lot of friends. When I came to the dungeon and joined up with Hekla and the Daughters, I was the weakest person in the group. I was completely overwhelmed by the loss of my world, and Hekla understood that. She had been a psychiatrist before the dungeon and she recognized the breakdown I was on the edge of. She talked me through it, taught me how to stay calm, and made sure that I was protected until I could handle things on my own. The other Daughters...well, they either weren't as forgiving of my uselessness as Hekla was or they were having their own problems. I felt safe in their midst but I didn't feel happy or have actual friends. And then we got separated by the stairs to the third level.

Even then, Hekla looked out for me. She convinced Carl and Donut to take me on and train me up. Donut became the first real friend I'd had in the dungeon. She was the bossy older sister from every television show, the kind who encouraged me to stretch myself and helped me with clothes and life advice. The kind that was completely unlike my actual older sisters.

Carl clearly hadn't wanted me to join them but he didn't take it out on me. He didn't particularly include me, but he did go out of his way to help me train and to generally grow as a dungeon dweller. Which mostly meant dragging me into fight after fight and constantly having me risk my life, but what can you do? When he had me risk my life it was only because he was leading the way and he expected me to have his back. He had never once talked down to me or put me in the way of harm that he wasn't risking himself. He'd been dismissive and unsupportive, but he'd never been cruel or unfair.

Given that history, talking with Jean and Ivan and Roberto was a new experience. I was deliberately disassociating, being Birgit instead of Katia. Katia was timid and shy. Birgit was assertive and tough and raunchy and just a little crass. Albert was helping me, feeding me lines when I stumbled, but I stumbled less often as time went by. The sheer trangressiveness of the cursing and overt sexuality was a rush and every time Roberto laughed at one of my snarky comments or Ivan blushed beet red while visibly struggling to look at my eyes, I felt important. Powerful. And also like a fraud who would be caught out sooner rather than later, but I made myself ignore those feelings and focus on the others.

Roberto was from Andorra, a nation so small I didn't even know that it existed until Albert cued me. He had been a music teacher before the dungeon. Now he was a borrocimom and a Tug Boat Captain, a grab-bag class that gave him small momentum bonuses to Strength and Constitution and a 10% lower mana cost for water magic.

Jean was a human in her fifties who had chosen to be a Gypsy Mystic, a rogue/wizard class based around illusions and stealth. She had a variety of useful skills and items, including one that allowed her to draw mana from anyone in her party in order to power her own abilities. One of those abilities was Manifest Spirit, which allowed her to render her illusions solid for a short period at the cost of a massive amount of mana.

Ivan was human, young, and a Steppes Warrior. He looked the part; he wore a spiked helmet and furs that left him sweltering but gave too many good stat boosts and equipment abilities to take off. He was armed with shortbow and cavalry saber, both of them powerfully magical.

When Carl finished relating the story of our adventure at the train station, Ivan whistled in surprise. "That's bad. What happened with Kralak's axe?"

"The blades rusted off before we were thirty minutes out of the station," I said sourly. "The handle rotted away twenty minutes later."

"Total rip-off," Donut groused. "We worked hard for that axe!"

"In fairness, we got some pretty good loot from the encounter," I reminded her.

"Hrmph. You got some good loot from it. Carl and I got junk."

I had gotten the Silver boss box. She had gotten that plus a variety of achievement boxes that netted her a Scroll of Upgrade, two skill bonus potions, and a variety of items that together contributed ten stat points, three of them in Constitution. That didn't sound like junk to me. Especially after the scroll raised the Double Tap skill that she got from her anklet to 6 and the potions raised her Magic Missile skill to 12 and her Dodge to 9.

"That does bring us around to the real question," Jean said. "What do we do next? Once we pick up this other group we'll have over a thousand crawlers. That's a lot of firepower, but it's also a lot of logistical issues. Everyone probably has enough crawler biscuits to eat but I for one don't have any water. Also, we'll need bathrooms."

"We could go through the 436 portal," Ivan said. "That gets us back to the repair station, right?"

"Remember how Carl told us that the repair yard is currently swarming with ghouls?" Roberto said. "No, we pick these guys up at 181 and then we back the train down the line to one of the stairwell stations and fort up until the stairs open."

"We're on a different line now than when we went through the portal before," Carl noted. "The 436 portal might or might not send us to the same repair yard."

"I'm not too keen on 'might'," Roberto said, frowning. "Carl, you said that the train cars don't go through the Abyss portal, just the engine. Right?"

"Yeah," Carl said, nodding. "The cars don't go through but passengers in the cars do, as long as they've got an engineer's key or one of those stupid souvenir hats that we all got when we came down the stairs."

"A lot of people don't have those anymore," Jean said. "The shopkeepers were buying them for 5,000 gold and no one knew that they were important."

Donut sniffed disapprovingly. "If they were that expensive then people should have assumed they were important."

"Yes, well, perhaps you will be there to advise me next time," Jean said, smiling and offering a small nod. Donut looked chagrined.

"Doesn't matter anyway," Ivan said. "Forting up isn't an option, and neither is going to 436. That's...what, thirty hours up the line from here? It's faster to back down the tracks. We've only got a week until the stairs open and we need to grind as much as possible before then. We can't afford to be underleveled when we hit the fifth floor."

"There's going to be four million ghouls ranging up the line," Roberto said grimly. "I think we'll be doing plenty of grinding."

Everyone fell quiet, daunted by the implications.

{Albert, are there other people we could save?} I subvocalized.

"There are other crawlers that we could connect with, but none that are certain to perish without our assistance," he replied to me alone, not sending the words to anyone else. "As of right now six methods have been discovered and propagated for how to reach the stairwells. Everyone I am tracking has a feasible plan for how to do so. Approximately thirty thousand of these plans require passing through one of the repair stations, each of which will presumably have a City boss like the Train Baby. Fortunately, everyone who will be required to take that option can connect with a large enough group to make the attempt."

{Six separate methods?} That was news to me. I'd been letting Albert handle my chat messages and had told him to only give me urgent things and I would review the rest the next time we stopped at a saferoom. {What are they?}

"The simplest is to find a route to one of the low-numbered stations on a track where derailment means there is no longer any traffic, at which point it is straightforward to walk down to one of the stairwell stations."

{How does that work? The whole problem has been that it's hard to get to the low-numbered stations.}

"I discovered six locations throughout the system where it was possible to blast through a wall, ceiling, or floor in order to move from a high-numbered station to a low-numbered station. It is straightforward to reach those six locations starting from any of several hundred different lines, although it may require quite a few transfers and a bit of safe albeit tedious hiking on the tracks of non-operational lines.

"Aside from hiking on the tracks, it is possible to take a train all the way to station 436 and take either the portal to the repair yard or the Abyss portal. I count this as two separate methods.

"As a fourth option, there is a series of trains called the Escape Velocity, the Escape Velocity II, and so on. They are accessible at any station whose number ends in 4 and is the next stop after a transit station. They run down and stop only at their starting point, station 60, the stairwell stations, and the repair yard."

{Station 60 is the employee housing, right?} I asked. I remembered Vernon telling us that.

"Indeed. The porters, engineers, and so on. Most importantly, all of the stations 60 are connected by way of portals. If one can reach a station 60 then one can reach any station 60, meaning that it's possible to shift from any line to any other line provided that one can find the appropriate chain of portals.

"The fifth option is a series of pipelines that serve as a coolant system for the generator facility which powers all the electric train lines. They pump cold water to the facility and heated water back out. Every transit station contains a concealed maintenance room from which a pair of the pipelines—one inbound coolant, one outbound waste heat—may be accessed. If the transit station has a number ending in 7 then there will also be a storeroom with submersible inspection capsules that allow for travel through the pipes. Once at the power facility it is a two hundred kilometer hike back to a repair yard, but it's quite possible to get out at one of the low-numbered transit stations and walk to a stairwell.

"Finally, there is a thoroughly unpleasant and risky yet workable method. At the bottom of the Abyss is a foundry where the discarded train cars are melted down and recycled into new cars which then pass through portals to the various stations 4 where they are cleaned, painted, upholstered, staged, and hooked up. The foundry is hot enough that passing through it will cause human flesh to burn within seconds, but the necessary distance is short. Anyone with a high enough Constitution and enough healing potions can hold their breath and sprint through. They will likely take third- or fourth-degree burns in the process from the superheated air and the hot metal of the flooring and pipes, but it's survivable given enough health and one can heal oneself upon emergence. The healing must be done quickly since the workers at station 4 will attack within seconds of a crawler emerging from the portal." He hesitated and cleared his throat. "Alternatively, the foundry workers are heat-immune and large enough that it's possible to use their gutted bodies as a protective suit. As a bonus, the worker mobs will ignore anyone wearing such a suit."

Well, that wasn't disturbing at all.

{So no one is going to suffer if we don't go after them?}

"No, Ms Katia. We have done our part and more."

"You okay there, pretty lady?" Roberto said, giving me what would probably have been a flirtacious smile if he hadn't been a fishman with needle-like teeth. "You're being awful quiet."

"Talking to...um, I mean, checking my virtual assistant," I said. Albert had requested that we keep details of his sapience and capabilities 'on the down-low, as I believe the popular children say.' "We don't have to rescue anyone else. They all have a way to get to the stairwells, so we can go fort up without feeling bad." Wait, that didn't sound like Birgit. I'd forgotten to sound badass. "More importantly, we can go farm some fuckin' XP on those shithead ghouls." There we go.

Jean frowned disapprovingly at my coarse language; she didn't say anything but I still cringed.