"This isn't going to work," Carl said.

The Royal Court and the three leaders of the newly named Battalion of Freedom were standing on the tracks behind the Rescue Rail looking 'south' towards the safety of station 72, so far away.

"Why not?" I asked.

He gestured to the train car behind us. It was a standard subway passenger car, 65 tons empty and nearly 80 counting the crawlers loaded into it.

"No cowcatcher," he said. "Even if it did, these tunnels fit a lot tighter than the ones for the named lines. There's nowhere for stuff to go when it gets thrown clear. One chunk of metal on the line could derail us."

"Doesn't the tight fit make it safer?" Ivan asked. "There's no room for the train to jump sideways."

Carl shrugged. "Maybe? I'm not a train guy. You want to bet on it?"

"We could just take it slow," I said.

"It's 3,000 kilometers," Jean said.

"The trains go 300 kilometers per hour," Carl said. "That's only 10 hours at full speed, but we can't afford to go anything like that fast."

Roberto studied the train car, rubbing his chin in thought, then walked over to study the rear door. He squatted down to look underneath the train.

"Can we fit everyone into the front nine cars?" he asked.

We all looked at each other.

"I believe so," Jean said. "What are you thinking?"

"Got an idea," he said, not answering the question.

"Are we going to hate it?" Donut asked.

"Probably. Also, we need some volunteers who want hazard pay."

Jean raised an eyebrow. "We don't get paid."

"Sure we do," he said, grinning. "XP is payment."

o-o-o-o

"Here we go," someone said softly to themselves.

"Dios mío," Maria muttered. She was standing next to me on the starboard side of the train and clutching onto one of the poles for balance as we clattered along.

Katia: Lots of mobs up ahead, Carl. Speed up.

Carl: Right.

The train picked up steam, shaking back and forth as we rushed down the tracks towards the tidal wave of mobs I could see racing towards us. I clicked one of the dots on the map.

Foxfire Kharnid. Level 39.

Warning: This mob is in the second stage of withdrawal. One more stage and then you're going to see something really exciting!

I couldn't get more than that until we were close enough to see them, but by that time I wouldn't care.

The cowcatcher on the nose of the Rescue Rail was easy to dismount from the train but too heavy for any one crawler to lift and put in their inventory. With several of us working together it was straightforward. Using a lot of teamwork and the extra space granted by the 181 platform we got it turned around and bolted to the back of the last car. We had to cut out the entire back wall to do it, but that was fine. While we were at it we also dismounted the doors, the seats, and punched several holes in the floor, being careful not to damage anything important in the process.

Twelve of us were spread along the walls of the train car, struggling and mostly failing to look calm in the face of what was about to happen. I had shapeshifted to give myself a lower center of gravity and half a dozen long, skinny arms. I tried to ignore the way everyone else looked discomfited by my form and subtly edged away.

We hit the first Kharnid and the cowcatcher bounced it up. It hit the tunnel wall and bounced again, its body landing in the train car with a wet crunch and a shower of blood. Joe scooped it up and tossed it in his inventory without a word.

We hit the next two within seconds, then two more a moment later. Within a minute we were into the thick of the crowd. I could feel the train slow down slightly from the impacts but then Carl leaned on the throttle and we sped up again.

By now it was a constant spray of bodies and parts of bodies. We couldn't put living things in inventory so we had installed long blades along the cowcatcher to ensure that the mobs were dead before they hit the floor. The blades broke within seconds and one of them caught Mary in the face, killing her instantly. Her husband John cried out and pulled her body into his inventory to keep it safe.

A severed head smacked me in the shoulder and bit down. Its teeth clinked off my metal armor and it fell to the ground. How it was alive I had no idea but I crushed it with my foot and inventoried the remains.

Blood was fountaining across us like we were being sprayed with a firehose. It drained out the open doors and the holes in the floor but we were all soaked and everyone was spitting it out of their mouths and keeping one arm up to shield their eyes. I was closest to the door so I reshaped my left side into an angled shield that diverted some of the flow down and away from my allies.

Thom, the Coal Engine kneeling opposite me, rocked slightly as a ghoul's torso slammed into him. Somehow the creature was still alive. Like the Kharnid, the ghoul was in the second stage of withdrawal. It had grown a carapace, an extra pair of arms, and its claws were massive. It shrieked at him and raked frantically at his rocky surface, tearing deep rents and making his health bar plummet. Lava oozed out of Thom's wounds and the ghoul howled as its fingers and claws burned away. Thom grabbed its head and squeezed until it exploded, then vanished the body into his inventory.

By now the car was ankle deep in body parts from front to back, coming in faster than we could kill them and vanish them. Worse, they had clogged up the drains on the floor and formed a partial dam in front of the door so the blood level was rising. People were inventorying what they could and kicking the rest out the doors where they were ground to mush against the tunnel wall. That wasn't a solution, since at least half the mush sprayed back into the car.

A big chunk of rebar bounced up and speared into my side, piercing right through my armor and into the flesh behind it. I pulled it out and tossed it into my inventory as I hit my Heal spell. I also reinforced my left side, shifting armor from the right side around to protect the left.

A frag snail slammed into Thom, exploding and splattering acid across him and me and Maria. She screamed and fell forward, clutching at her face. A spray of body parts battered her head and her health bar dropped like a rock. I grabbed her with one arm and pulled her back so that she was in the lee of my body, holding her there as she thrashed. More arms grabbed a water bottle from my inventory and pulled her hands away from her face so I could wash the acid away. I toweled her down and hit her with a healing scroll; the chemical burns on her face and chest healed but the bloody sockets of her ruined eyes did not. I cursed and draped a gangway chock over her to keep her as safe as I could, bracing it with some junk so that it didn't crush her.

My distraction proved expensive. The frag snail's body fragments had disappeared into the knee-deep slurry of blood and mush and torn-off monster limbs. More than a dozen new frag snails were rising from the muck. They had finished regenerating their shells, meaning they now counted as living creatures and couldn't be placed in inventory. In another ten or fifteen seconds they would be fully grown and would move to attack. We were still being hosed down by dead and dying mobs and parts of mobs, making it hard to see what was happening.

I extruded Albert's rim out my right side, his cargo bag opening below. I grabbed the two nearest snails, each of them about 30 centimeters in diameter, and tossed them inside. I pulled Albert's rim back against my side to contain the blast and slammed the snails as hard as I could through his fabric. They exploded, tearing deep into the metal armor that I had thinned out to better defend the other side. The acid burned at me but I threw it and the snail into my inventory and reached for two more snails.

A snail went flying past me, hurled by Gunter the super-strong misisti. The thing flew thirty meters up the track and exploded on impact, spraying its acid over whatever mobs were up there.

"Everybody up!" I shouted, running down the aisle as fast as I could. Albert canceled most of my weight, letting me run across the top of the thigh-deep muck. I got past the last of the frag snails and spun around.

Everyone was on their feet and holding onto the horizontal bars that ran the length of the train to provide balance for standing passengers. I said a brief prayer and slapped on Force Shape.

"Lift!" I called as the invisible Y-shaped scoop appeared in front of me. It was knee-high and sized to fit down the aisle but I didn't have a lot of hope that it would.

Everyone crunched, hanging on the bar and lifting their feet up as high as they could while the blood and bodies crashed into them. The only exception was Thom, who was too big and too heavy; he had no choice but to stay kneeling in the doorway and hope that I had measured properly.

I hit Rush and was thrown down the aisle at racecar speeds, my invulnerable force-field scoop moving in front of me like a giant squeegee.

The good thing about Rush was that it used my body as a nigh-unstoppable battering ram and while it was in effect I was invulnerable. It still hurt to crash into things but it didn't actually cause me any damage. The problem with Rush was that it was unpredictable. Sometimes I went straight, sometimes I veered to the side by ten or even twenty degrees. Sometimes I went five meters, sometimes I went ten.

This time, predictably, it did not do what I wanted. I veered to the side, my wedge tearing through three of the metal support poles along with a chunk of the wall. Fortunately, the acceleration was enough to catapult everything in my scoop, including all but one of the frag snails, out the back of the train. Gunter grabbed the last snail and hurled it past me.

I ended the Force Shape and resumed my position on the floor. Everyone else dropped off the rails and followed suit. We were nearly to the end of this crowd of mobs but there were still body parts to dispose of.

o-o-o-o

I stretched as I came out of the personal space and into the IHOP that was the station 71 saferoom. Ivan was sitting near the door so I stopped to chat for a moment.

"Good morning, or whatever time it is. How's the line?"

"Holding," he said, yawning; he must have just come off shift because he looked exhausted. He was plowing through a trio of sausage links and a massive omelette that oozed cheese and peppers. "The ghouls are coming faster, like they're getting desperate, but Yvette, Charlie, and Muhammad have been building up the defenses faster than the ghouls can tear them down. Plus, another group of crawlers showed up a couple hours after you went to bed. Two of them were in that third-floor explosion quest with you and Carl and Donut; they got the same personal-space rewards as you guys and it's helping a lot."

"Cool," I said. Several dozen of the 1,000+ crawlers currently defending the station had personal spaces, all of them accessible from station 71. Ours included magical showers and magical beds that could take up to eight people if packed cheek by jowl. Using them at capacity we could, every two hours, give twenty-four crawlers +20% to their base stats and +10% to skill training and XP gain. The other personal spaces all included equally good benefits.

Donut was very grumpy about having so many strangers traipsing through her home and sleeping in her bed (not that she ever used it, since she always slept in Carl's room), but she understood the importance and was being a good sport about it. By which I meant that she confined her complaining to me and Carl and kept it to all-caps chat messages as opposed to saying anything out loud.

"How did they get in?" I asked.

"Through one of the portals. They messaged ahead so we were able to sally and disable the traps around it."

"Anyone hurt?"

He nodded, a trail of hot cheese dripping from his mouth. He paused to slurp it up, then swallowed. "A couple, but the healers got to them in time. Oh, and one of the Philips lost a leg but Fai replaced it with a magical pegleg that gives superleap and a once per day laser cannon." He waved a hand in dismissal. "I mean, it's not called a laser cannon, it's got some fantasy name, but that's what it is."

"Wow."

Motion caught my eye; Carl and Donut were seated over by the wall and Donut was waving frantically at me.

"I'm being summoned," I said with a smile. "Catch you later." I started to walk over, shifting into a hip-swaying saunter at Albert's reminder.

Wilbert, the Bopca Protector who ran this restaurant, hurried over to take my breakfast order as soon as I sat down. Everyone fought for six hours and then rested for six, so the saferoom was packed with off-duty crawlers who were eating, drinking, chatting, and playing dice or cards. At the counter there was, as always, a line that stretched out the door. Poor Wilbert had been unable to keep up with demand until some of the younger crawlers stepped up to serve as waiters and counter staff. He had been a bit scandalized about the idea and still insisted on doing some of it himself.

The trip from 181 back to station 70 had not stopped being exciting after the first crowd we plowed through: There had been three more after that, which was good enough to push me up to level 32. Once we got there we had parked the rearmost passenger car as a roadblock so that the ghouls couldn't get at us. Upon hearing this plan one of the other crawlers, a man named Kagome, had promptly gone off on a rant about what stinking idiots we were and did we want the stinking mobs to sneak up and rip our stinking eyeballs out?! The rant went on from there, getting more histrionic by the minute.

Rude and crazy as he was, he made some good points, so we went the extra mile with our roadblocks. We left the back half of the train to blockade the area between 70 and 71 and the front half to blockade between 72 and 73. We ripped up the track in front and behind of the blockading cars to ensure they couldn't be pushed or pulled out of position. We welded metal shutters over the windows and doors and packed the internal spaces and undersides with heavy, spikey junk. Finally, Yvette used her Construction Foreman class abilities to dig ditches in front of the blocking cars and to raise stone walls under, over, and around them.

Station 71 was a transfer station which mobs should not be able to enter, but we fortified it anyway. Then, with a secure path from the saferoom at station 71 to the stairwell at 72, we went to work on station 72. It was not easy; we had been expecting to be dealing with two or three lines, as was the case with most transfer stations. Unfortunately, the stairwell stations turned out to have portals at them that meant they were effectively connected to fifty or sixty different train lines. That was a lot of different places enemies could be coming from. We located the natural chokepoints in the building and improved upon them as fast as we could. Yvette and her construction-themed abilities had been an enormous help with digging spiked pits under portals, raising solid stone walls out of the ground to block passage and funnel attackers down, and so on. Carl and thirty other crawler with trap-making abilities had laid traps everywhere. Other crawlers had used a wide array of abilities, including one guy who created animated statues that would attack any red-tagged mob passing by. We layered defenses one on top of each other without stopping to rest.

It was good that we did, since about nine hours after we arrived mobs of various kinds started coming through the portals and attacking, first in a trickle and then in a flood.

I was on the first shift, so I spent the first six hours fighting, then I stayed on the line for another hour because there was a heavy push from a group of third-stage Blister Ghouls. I eventually had to step back and let someone else take my place while I got some sleep. Last I had seen, Carl and Donut had been covering a different section of the line, but here they were. Either they had gotten up before me or their turn in the bed rotation hadn't come up yet.

"Anything fun on the recap?" I asked.

"The fish fucked us hard. Check your system messages," Carl said sourly. He had the remains of four banana pancakes drowned in maple syrup and butter on his plate and the last third of a tall glass of grapefruit juice alongside it. He was stabbing at the pancakes with his fork and glaring as though they had personally offended him.

With a feeling of dread, I pulled up my message log and paged back to the latest announcements.

Good evening, crawlers! We hope everyone is having fun!

There has been a major problem with chat spamming lately, as well as one instance of identity theft. To resolve this, advanced chat functionality has been disabled and identity protocols have been enacted on the interface—only one ID per node, thank you!

Most of you have managed to reach a stairwell—congratulations! Of course, now you're just sitting there instead of doing anything interesting. We wouldn't want you to be bored, or to bore our viewers, so we've cranked up the speed on the ghoul generators, shortened the drug withdrawal and hatching timers, increased the litter size for the Pipe Snake mobs, and doubled the spawning instinct of all mobs so that they will be more motivated to come visit you for a lovely cup of tea and a spot of bloody murder. There have been a few other tweaks here and there, but that's not important.

That's all for now. Now get out there and kill, kill, kill!

My stomach fell into my nonexistent boots. "Albert? Can—"

"Quiet, please. There are others around who don't realize that I'm sapient. Yes, our communications have been neutered. Chain-filtered blast, promiscuous announce, open relay functionality, no-touch relaying, automated network protocols, the ability to send anything other than text...it's all gone. Chat is now only with people you have authorized via physical contact and there is no automation support. Furthermore, they've deleted the contact lists."

My stomach clenched and I dove into my interface to check. Sure enough, my contacts were empty. Hekla and the Daughters, those reassuring voices in my ear, were beyond my reach.

Albert was still talking, unaware of my horror. "We need to start over and re-authorize from scratch. Plus, they limited everyone to no more than one hundred contacts and restricted the outgoing chat system to one user per instance, meaning that I can't use it anymore."

I was starting to feel physically sick. {You can't send chat messages?} Albert had been the one coordinating everything. He had designed the defenses based on the abilities people had shared with us. He had put together team recommendations for how people should party up on the next floor in order to maximize both survivability and XP gain. He had been the one to put together the roster of who used which sleeping space and bathroom at what time. Without him to coordinate....

"I cannot send messages myself, but I can place them into your interface and you can send them. It will suffice to let me loop Carl and Donut in when I'm speaking to you. Deucedly irritating, however. I can also manage the messages that arrive so I can at least keep you from being spammed."

I groaned. I guess that was what happened when widespread communication and hundreds of thousands of crawlers working together allowed us to break the level in four days flat.

"That sucks," I said aloud.

"Yup," Carl growled.

"You're looking at the announcement about the chat nerf?" asked a crawler from the next booth, swiveling around so he could look at me. He was human, maybe sixteen, with bad acne and a golden helmet that left his face exposed. "Yeah, it sucks, but at least they said that most people had already gotten to a stairwell. Everyone here has been authorizing like crazy, so we'll all max out our contact lists by the time we go down. If you've already authorized with someone it doesn't hurt and if you hit your limit it'll ask if you want to replace one of your existing contacts, so be sure you fistbump everyone."

"I will, thanks. Also, my eyes are up here."

He gulped and yanked his gaze up to my face, blushing furiously. "Sorry. Um..."

"Don't worry about it." I offered him a fist and he bumped it, putting each of us in the other's chat list. I gave him a smile and a wink, then settled down across from Carl to wait for my food. Albert had to remind me to fistbump Carl and Donut.

o-o-o-o

Time to level collapse: 3 days, 14 hours.

Views: 478 Trillion

Followers: 50 Trillion

Favorites: 872 Billion

"Anything new?" I asked, plonking down across from Carlos. I had a tray with hash browns, four scrambled eggs with cheese, six slices of bacon, and two pieces of heavily buttered rye toast. It smelled like heaven. I also had my metal-eating kit but I would get through the hot food first.

He nodded. "Some good news for once. Well, mixed. One of the other large teams—they call themselves the Army of Sweetness and Light—spent their time grinding in the tunnels instead of camping beside a stairwell. This morning they headed to one of the station 48s. Turns out that a crapton of third-stage 'Festering Ghouls' had been homing in on the place, and when they arrived they melded together into one giant monster." He paused. "It's a Province boss."

My eyes widened. The Train Baby had been ridiculously tough, and that was only a City boss.

"It ate thirty of them before they realized what they were facing and backed off," he said. "Which is why I said 'mixed news'. The good part is that they managed to retreat, catch a train up to 97, and then take submersibles down to us. That's another 106 crawlers added to the team."

"Cool," I said, nodding in satisfaction. I chuckled. "How many times have you said 'I told you so' to Ivan?" The younger man had wanted to go hunting instead of forting up. If we hadn't gotten here so early there might have been a Province boss waiting for us as well.

Carlos chuckled. "Honestly, Kat, you have such a low opinion of me. I'm a grown man."

I smiled, amused, and started shoveling down the eggs. I was due on the battle lines in twenty minutes. "Oh, while I'm thinking about it, how is Maria?" After being blinded on the train she had fallen into a depression, made worse after two dozen people used every method they had to restore her eyes, all without success.

Carlos's smile slipped. "She killed herself. She tried to go fight on the combat line but wasn't allowed to. Bill was on duty in the hospital ward, but he left her alone for twenty minutes to answer a call on the line. When he got back she was dead. We think she used mana potions to poison herself. Her gear was distributed among her original team."

I froze. What could you even say to that? "Crap."

"Yeah." He fell silent in turn, poking at his food. "Oh, there's a new monster showing up on the Coconut and Koamaru lines. It's called a 'Blood Fiend'. Little demon-shaped things a few centimeters tall. They can slip through small spaces so they're good at getting through any cracks in the barricades. Not too dangerous on their own, but if you kill one of them the others will run over and jump in the blood. They absorb all the blood and grow bigger, stronger and tougher. At a certain size they start developing a bunch of different magical abilities. You need to use fire, acid, electricity, or something else that doesn't make them bleed. Whatever you do, don't use blades or spikes. They get out of control fast if you do. We almost lost Squad 14."

{Albert?}

"Ronan Kim, Riccardo Santiago, Fred Benitez, Viktor Pruitt, and Esha Marsh. Esha is their healer, a woman, and was already wounded. Heavy burns on her leg."

"How is Esha?" I asked aloud. "She had those burns on her leg. She didn't get any other permanent injuries, did she?"

Carlos snorted. "You're cheating, aren't you? As of this morning there's something like eleven- or twelve hundred people here. No one could remember the names of every single person on every single squad, much less their injuries."

I shrugged and gave him a Birgit wink. I needed to be Birgit right now, because Katia wasn't dealing well with Maria's death. "Hey, what can I say? When you got it, you got it."

"Sure. Esha's okay. Before we knew their gimmick, one of the Fiends soaked up enough blood to grow human high. It bit her and inflicted a Wasting debuff that kept draining her health away, but there were enough healers onsite to keep her alive until the debuff wore off. Greg Harmon—you know, the guy with the 'MMA Champion' class? He grappled the Fiend and kept breaking parts of it until it died without actually bleeding." He laughed. "He even did that Batman line about being the surgeon."

"Huh?"

"From Knightfall? It's famous. Batman is fighting the Mutant Leader in this mudpit, gets him down and starts breaking his arms and legs. He says"—his voice dropped into a deep growl and he scowled at me—"'You don't get it boy. This isn't a mudhole. It's an operating table.'" He jerked his hands as though snapping something and made a ccccrack! sound "'And I'm the surgeon!'" He relaxed and his voice went back to its natural register. "It was pretty awesome."

"I'll take your word for it." I had never been a Batman fan, and right now I was too focused on my bacon to pay much attention. It was so. Damn. Good! I didn't know how the Bopca all managed to be such incredible cooks, but I definitely appreciated the distraction from all the people dying and being maimed around me.

Carlos's eyes unfocused for a moment as he checked the time on his interface and then he knocked back the rest of his coffee and stood up. "I'm on duty in five minutes. Me and some of the other guys are having a game of pinochle after the shift is over. You want to join?" He did his best to make the offer seem casual but I could hear the suppressed nervousness and hopefulness.

"Love to," I said, giving him my best smile.