Once the defenses were set, Katia returned to her humanoid form and stood next to me and Imani. I imagined the giant abyss pit filling up with the monsters, so many of them together that it overflowed. The pit was much too big for that to really happen, though I suspected the majority of these monsters were surviving the high fall from the portal to the bottom of the abyss. These things were squishy and resistant to blunt trauma. The pit was probably a writhing mass of these monsters by now. I wondered if they got along with the hordes of ghouls that lived in the bottom of the abyss. Or with the wall monitor lizards who lived on the edges.
It didn’t matter, I decided. As long as they remained way over there.
In fact, I realized as I watched the constant stream of creatures, it was probably a good thing for everybody if they did survive the fall into the pit. These were living, non-undead creatures, which meant every time one of them died, a ghoul was generated at a nearby ghoul generator.
“Some of these guys we’ve had to kill three times,” I said. “Once when they hit the stage-three DTs, then again when they’re Krakaren babies, and then again if they turn into ghouls.”
“It’s a lot more than that,” Imani said. “The stage-three monsters were each birthing thousands of these octopuses. Octopi? What’s the right word?”
“We got incoming,” someone shouted. A group of red dots appeared on the map, though it wasn’t so many. Maybe twenty of them. I felt the hot whoosh of the flamethrowers even halfway across the room. The mobs were killed in seconds.
“Hey, don’t be an experience hog!” Donut shouted at a crawler at the front defensive position.
“Yo, Donut,” I called over my shoulder. “Play nice. We’re all on the same team here.”
“Carl, I said I had the monster on the left, and he shot him first with the flamethrower!”
“You did not call the target,” the crawler said. “And I am not a ‘he.’” I looked over and saw what the problem was. The crawler operating the flamethrower was a Level-27 Dog Soldier. Her class was something called a Crisper. She looked like a walking, talking German Shepherd. She had a Vietnam-era helmet on her head with little holes cut out for her ears. Her name was Tserendolgor. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how to pronounce that name, nor guess what nationality she originally was. But the fact she was a dog-themed race meant Donut would have an instant dislike of her.
“Goddamnit, Donut,” I said. “Go to a different position and leave her alone.”
“Yeah, go to a different position, cat,” the woman said.
Donut hissed but led Mongo to the other side of the room.
“And I thought she was getting better after all that business with Growler Gary,” Katia said.
“That is better,” I said. “You should hear her talk about cocker spaniels.”
“Oh, I have,” Katia said. “She’s told me all about your next-door-neighbor’s dog, Angel.”
“They’re still coming from below, but maybe not as many,” Imani said, leaning over the portal to get a better look. “I wish it wasn’t so blurry so we could see into the hole.”
“It’s definitely getting less thick with monsters,” Katia agreed.
“You know,” I said to Katia. “If your whole double-sided track theory is correct, then there’s a straight line through that hole to the other chamber 36, and there’s probably one of those province bosses in there. Super close. That’s what I was originally worried about when you said the tracks were mirrored.”
“Yeah, me too,” Katia said. “If we didn’t have your portal, I’d be worried about it spreading into this room.”
Behind us, another group of mobs approached and were quickly dispatched. Then another. Soon, we had red dots all around us. There were four chokepoint entrances to the chamber, not including the secret one to the employee line, which we kept closed and guarded. The Nightmare was down there, still parked a few stations down. I’d poked my head into the line a bit earlier to see if the train was still there. We’d last used it to ferry Brynhild’s Daughters to sixty, and that’s where it remained.
Donut and I had walked down there earlier to see if Fire Brandy was still kickin’, and she was. We’d found her leaning out of her hole in the cockpit, talking with a pair of dwarven engineers who’d apparently climbed in through the broken side window. One of them had wanted to take the train to I-don’t-know-where, but Brandy had refused. “There’s nowhere to go, you fool,” she’d been saying when we walked up. The dwarf had argued, and I’d thought maybe we’d have a fight on our hands. But they quickly left upon our arrival.
The train was still on and idling. I could tell right away that something was wrong with the demon woman. Her usual, matter-of-fact, southern-belle-but-also-German persona had shifted to something more melancholy. She was still giving birth regularly. I didn’t know if we’d get another chance to see her before the floor ended, and I’d wanted to collect more of the sheol rocks. I’d shown one to Mordecai and he’d practically jizzed himself and told me to retrieve as many as possible. I’d asked her if she could part with any, and she allowed me to take several hundred still-burning pieces along with a few dozen that hadn’t yet caught on fire.
“I’d give it all to you,” she said. “But I need to keep the fire burning nice and hot. Keep my babies happy, for as long as it will last.”
“Brandy, are you okay?” Donut asked.
“I talked to that dwarf friend of yours,” she said. “Tizquick. He told me about his daughter. They killed her, you know. Once word spread, they started to get angry.”
“Who?” I asked. “Who is they? And who did they kill?”
“The dwarves and the gremlins. They killed Madison, the human you brought up here. The human resources woman. They built a stand and a noose, and they hanged her. I didn’t see it, but they brought her body to me. I took it into the fire.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Only those mantaur creatures are holding the faith. I guess a few tried to fight the dwarves, but they all got chased off. I don’t know about those guys. There might still be some out there, so be careful.”
“That’s… that’s crazy,” I said. Madison hadn’t deserved that. Well, her character deserved it. That was the thing, wasn’t it? All these NPCs were playing characters, and only a handful were starting to realize it.
And that, I realized, was the problem with Brandy. She’d finally realized that this was all a construction. How did one deal with that? Especially one who had children?
“We gotta get back there,” I said. “If I don’t see you, take care of those babies, okay?”
The demon woman didn’t answer. She just nodded and returned to her fire.
An hour later, and the number of monsters coming through the hole in the center of the room had trickled to a stop, but the mobs were now approaching us from all the other angles. We were starting to see blister ghouls mixed in with the octopus monsters. I moved to stand next to Donut. We let the flamethrowers do most of the work, but I tossed smoke curtains and the non-explosive bangers at the incoming monsters while Donut hurled Magic Missiles at them. She occasionally cast Second Chance on one of the corpses and then Clockwork Triplicate. The zombie Krakarens wreaked havoc on their fellow clones for several seconds before they were torn down. Katia returned to her gun form. She towered over the group, choosing to sit high and fire down into the throngs. We stood amongst hundreds of other crawlers all throwing fire at the mobs. We held them back, but sometimes the waves were so thick, so frenzied, I feared we’d be overwhelmed.
Our only respite came when the dead filled the hallways so much, it created a clog. It’d remain that way for several minutes until the acid blood broke down their own bodies, and the corpses started to melt. Sometimes the corpses exploded for no reason, showering acid at the defenders. We lost several people that way.