I thought back to the time Katia and I entered the empty stairwell station. It’d been a group of stairwells, all closed. They were in a circle in the middle of the room. How big was that empty space in the middle of the circle? Pretty big. About the circumference of a railway tunnel.
Carclass="underline" Fuck me. I think I’ve figured it out.
31
Immediately after the revelation, we jumped into action. I frantically sent out a notification for everybody to abandon all stairwell stations. Any other place would be safer. We didn’t know exactly when it was going to happen, but I suspected it would be soon.
A few groups thought I was full of shit, and they happily said so. Thankfully I talked Bautista over at the crowded station 72 to get out of there. They mostly fell back to the employee station 60, waiting to see what would happen. Several other groups retreated to the tracks and the platforms. They still had ghouls to contend with there, but not so many. For now the Krakaren babies were staying put and only attacking if you got near station 24. The little fuckers were getting bigger by the hour.
Elle took a team of fighters, including Katia and Donut, to range down to the outskirts of station 24 to fight and grind on the things, which were now all level 14-17 Krakaren Juvenile Clonelings. They were monkey-sized and covered with tentacles. Katia was trying out her new crowd control techniques while the others experimented with different types of attacks to see what worked best against them. Fire worked well. Crossbow bolts took them down, but only if you hit center mass. Chopping off their tentacles caused them to retreat, but only temporarily. Spells like Magic Missile worked, but not too well. Lightning did nothing. Elle’s freeze attacks did nothing unless it was an icicle through the body. Bashing weapons only worked if you hit really hard. Psychic attacks worked really well, causing them all to stop for a moment, but it didn’t do any real damage. We only had two people who could cast that type of magic.
The monsters were fast and had round, teeth-filled mouths that worked like living garbage disposals. Their tentacles burned on touch. Their blood was caustic, like with the xenomorphs from Alien. Plus they screamed, Katia said, which was really unnerving.
While Katia and Donut killed Krakaren children, I went to work. It took a good five hours to get the two interdiction carts back to station 75 and then dialed into a colored line that intersected with the correct station 36. From there I gathered 20 high-strength crawlers, and we went to work transporting one of the two carts—we chose the Def Leppard cart—from the rails to inside the main chamber of station 36. We physically lifted it off the tracks. I was worried 20 guys wouldn’t be enough, but once again I underestimated our extreme strength. We lifted it easily and with little effort. After some experimenting, I found it only took five or six guys to lift the cart.
When I first came up with the idea, I hadn’t thought it through. Each rapid-response cart was about the width and height of a cargo van, and maybe one and a half times longer. While the station platform, and the stairwell itself, was just wide enough to carry the cart, there was no way to get it through the tight hallway system that led to the main room of station 36. In my head, the caverns had been much bigger, but when I arrived, I realized the plan was DOA. The hallway walls were practically indestructible, and we didn’t have time to fuck around trying to figure out how to widen them, go around several bends, and then get the train cart into the room.
Salvation came in the form of Zhang, Li Jun’s best friend. He emerged just as I was directing the crawlers to put the cart back on the track. I examined the bald, Chinese man’s properties as he came jogging up. He was still human. He was a level-28 Earth Mover. Li Jun had said he was a mage-tank combo. He now wore glowing, black and gold, segmented armor.
“Stop. Wait,” he said. He bent over, breathless. “Sorry. I ran here from the safe room. Li Jun told me what you’re attempting, and I’ve come to help.” He held up a stick. “I got you guys.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s a magic wand. It shrinks. It only has one charge left. It doesn’t work on living things, but we still used it get past a few bosses. Once we shrunk the monster’s collar, and it choked him to death. And once I used it to stop a train that was going to run us down. I was saving the last zap for an emergency. It’ll work on the train cart, make it small for five minutes. But it’ll still be as heavy as before.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s amazing. How small will it make it? If it’s still heavy, we’ll still need it big enough that we can push and turn it.”
“Size is easy,” he said. “It starts shrinking once I zap it, and it keeps getting smaller until I turn it off. Otherwise it stops on its own when it’s about the size of a button.”
“And you did it on a train before? You know it’ll work?”
“Yes,” he said. “It worked on the whole train and killed everybody on board. I jumped six levels all at once. I even got a boss box and a multi-kill box. It saved our lives.”
“Well, shit,” I said, turning to the other crawlers. “Let’s get this thing back up the stairs.”
After a harrowing four and half minutes rolling the much-smaller cart through the twisting hallway, we pushed heavy cart into the main chamber. We quickly shoved it to the center of the room, stopping it between the circle of inactive stairwells. It sat on the circle in the middle of the room. The floor had a faint etching on it: a side view of the Syndicate logo that I’d never have noticed if Mordecai hadn’t shown us the night before. We all quickly backed up as the cart returned to its regular size, making a popping noise like a balloon being inflated.
“All righty,” I said, slapping my hands together. “Now comes the fun part.”
Imani came to stand next to me. She regarded the cart suspiciously. I knew she wasn’t a big fan of this idea, especially the next part. Still, she’d contributed to the plan. She’d still had a few of those chain-making scrolls in her inventory, and I asked her to use them. Several piles of the magical chain sat coiled and ready.
“Are you sure about this?” she asked. She had her colorful butterfly wings fully extended, and every time they touched me, they gave me a constitution buff that lasted ten minutes. The buff didn’t stack, but the timer reset every time the ethereal wings brushed across me. Each brush felt soft against my skin, like a sudden, pleasant breeze.
“No,” I said. I started pulling large, metal pieces from my inventory as the others started attaching the chains to the cart. “No, I’m not sure. But nobody else was coming up with any other ideas.”
She nodded. “What about the others? At the other stations.”
“I warned them what’s coming. That’s the best we can do. Some people are sending folks to the Desperado to buy smoke curtains and hobgoblin dynamite to get ready. Others are forming outside the rooms and waiting to see what happens. If it happens like I anticipate, it’s about to get crazy. Everyone is going to have to fight. They’ll have to carve their way to the stairwells and then keep that path open while everyone goes down.”
“And you really think this cart will keep us from having to fight?” Imani asked.
I grinned. “Oh, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of fighting. I just want to even the odds a little.”
Across the way, a man with a spell that worked like an arc welder joined up two pieces of metal that had been too big for me to work at my engineering or new metalworking table. I’d already attached the two train wheels to the top, which were part of the pulley and lever system that we’d use to lift the cart. When they were done putting all the pieces together, the crane would have five legs, one placed between each of the five stairwells. Each piece would arch up and meet high above the center of the five stairwells. When we were done, it would look like some bullshit college campus art installation, or a half-finished jungle gym, instead of what it really was: a crane.