Elle: First off, there was one of those weird-ass double stack boss dudes on the employee line. A mantaur or whatever they’re called. I thought they were regular NPCs, but he attacked us. We took care of it. But make sure there’s a sentry on that employee entrance in case there’s more. Anyway, station 12 is definitely the one that blew. All the monsters are dead. There’s not even that much rubble, not like the last one. There’s loads of corpses. The crystal is still floating in the middle of the room above the burnt-out generator, but it’s not glowing anymore. It’s tiny, like the size of a marble. There’s a hole in the floor here, too, but nothing is coming up.
Imani: Look through the hole in the floor and see if you can see through to the other room. Don’t go down there. Look quick and then come back.
Elle: I’m walking up now. Yeah. Hey Katia, has anybody called you a genius lately? The hole goes all the way to the other room. There’s about a 20-foot drop, and there’s another door. That room looks burnt-out, too. Weird. It’s upside down. What a trip. Hang on, I’m going to drop a rock in to see what happens.
Imani: Don’t. Just come back.
Elle: Oh, unwad your panties. What are we calling the inbetween space? The escape tunnel?
Donut: WE ARE CALLING IT THE NOODLE.
Elle: I dropped a rock, and it fell all the way into the room across the way, but then it fell back. It hit the edge of the hole, bounced once, and then it rolled along the interior of the noodle. I thought it would float in the middle, but it looks like “down” is just toward the closest interior wall. You could walk a loop-de-loop in the thing and always feel like you’re standing upright. Like one of those carnival rides that spins really fast. I wonder what would happen if I balanced a rock exactly in the middle. Maybe it would float.
“Imani,” I said. “I need a team to help us fight our way back to my last interdiction cart.” We’d left it turned on upon the track, plugging the southward hole toward the train station. However, the mobs were coming from all directions now. Hopefully they’d left it alone. “If it’s still there, Donut, Katia, and I are going to jump on and then head toward the trainyard. I’ll need to keep three or four of them with us because we’re going to need to lift the thing up.”
“What about the mimic?” Imani asked.
“We’re not going to approach it. But if it comes for us, we’ll just hit it with the portal again.”
She looked at me dubiously. “All right. I’ll ask for volunteers.”
But before she even had the chance to ask, Li Jun, Zhang, and Li Na were suddenly there, right by my side.
“He has his volunteers,” Li Jun said.
“What about the rest of your team?” I asked. I looked for the others. I recognized their old boss, one of the men we’d saved from the Maestro. He was standing next to the mushroom guy and several of the others, defending one of the four exits.
“They are needed here. We will help best we can and return,” Li Jun said. “It is the least we can do.”
“Awesome,” I said, looking at the three in turn.
I hadn’t had the time to examine, or meet, Li Na yet, but I examined her now. I remembered her as a slight, almost mousy woman. She was taller now, rail thin. Her skin was deathly pale, ghost-like. She still resembled the woman she was, but her face had taken on an odd, demon-like appearance. Her mouth was almost twice as wide as it should be, and her brow was deeply ridged. A short pair of black horns stuck up through her black hair. She wore a flowing, white and red robe with long, wide arms that almost reached the floor. Chains hung from the arm holes, and they dragged as she walked, causing her to jingle. I knew from the recap episode that she had at least four different chains she fought with. One caught on fire and another tossed wind blades when she swung it like a lasso over her head. One could keep mobs immobilized. She was level 30, and her race was something called a Changbi. Her class was the ominous-sounding Slave Driver.
She met my gaze, her dark eyes boring into me. Despite her disturbing appearance, I could see why Zhang had a thing for her. There was something there, deep and alluring. But also terrifying. She had an I-might-murder-you-at-any-moment-but-it’ll-probably-be-fun-for-both-of-us aesthetic.
She bowed slightly. “Thank you for saving me and my brother. Twice.” She turned to Donut and bowed again.
“You are quite welcome,” Donut said, swishing her tail.
“Okay,” I said. “We have a lot to do, and not much time to do it. But the first step is to get to that cart.”
“Maybe you should tell us the whole plan before we dive headfirst into battle,” Li Na said. “In case you die, then we will know what the mission is and can carry on.”
Donut: SHE DOES HAVE A POINT, CARL.
Li Na, it turned out, was pretty damn smart. And intense. She reminded me a little of Imani, plus Chris, Brandon’s brother, who was still in the wind somewhere. And Hekla. She did not talk often, but when she did speak, it was usually to point out an obvious flaw in my plan. Both Li Jun and Zhang were too timid to tell me if I was full of shit. Donut wasn’t, but she rarely had an alternate plan. Katia often had good ideas, but she was prone to second-guessing herself to the point of letting me bowl right over her. I could tell right away Li Na would not suffer any fools, and if she opened her mouth, everybody around her paused to hear what she had to say.
We would never work well together as a party. Not after this, not if we wanted to remain friendly with one another. It’s not that I didn’t want to work with someone like her. In fact, I probably needed more people like her around me. I thought she was pretty cool, but I could tell she was quickly getting irritated with me. That was okay. Small teams that occasionally worked together was still the best way to go. There possibly was a formal way to attach separate parties according to the cookbook, but it didn’t get turned on until the sixth floor. A guild system. It was only mentioned in the 22nd edition of the cookbook, so I didn’t know for certain if it was still a thing or not. That happened a lot, where they tested new features for a crawl or two before they decided on whether to keep it or not. I hoped it remained.
It was Li-Na’s idea to raise up the Def Leppard cart and then poke at the ass of the province boss on the other side of the noodle. If we enticed it to attack, it’d hit the portal and teleport to the abyss. “It’ll sweeten the pot and give us an additional fall-back point,” Li-Na had said.
It was a fantastic idea, and I told her so. We couldn’t kill the thing, but we could at least get it the hell out of here. We’d have to do this now before we left. I quickly told the others the plan.
The monsters continued to come at us in waves from the hallways. It was constant, though less intense than before. About twenty percent of the people on my chat were just gone, which was a devastating amount, but honestly, it was much less than I anticipated. It turned out the Krakaren monsters had invaded all the transfer stations, but the regular, empty stations that weren’t prime numbers or stairwell stations did not have trap doors in them, and those places all had only a single entrance. Bautista and his group were set up at three such stations. Each station had a short, easily-defensible entrance that was at the top of a thin set of stairs. All around the tangle, others were doing the same.
I warned everyone to keep at least two stations away from either station 12 or 72, the two types of station with soul crystals. We were going to attempt to blow them all at once.
But there were several things I had to do first, starting with this province boss. As Li Na had said, teleporting this thing to the abyss would just add to the pile.