Prepotente screamed.
“I have questions,” I said. “So very many questions.”
“Maybe some other time, sweetie,” the woman said. “We need to find a different boss monster now. Ciao!”
They both departed from view. A new creature appeared, but only for a moment. It was huge and dark and covered with phantom, black flames that flickered with wisps that drank the light. Three pairs of human-like breasts ran down the monster’s underside. This was another goat, transformed. It was the size of a horse. We’d seen this thing before. Mordecai had called it a hellspawn familiar. It made a wet chittering noise, something I felt deep in my bones. The air crackled with heat as it passed.
I exchanged a look with Imani, and she shook her head. The bizarre exchange told me all I needed to know about that group. We needed to stay the fuck away from them.
“Did you hear that?” Donut said. “He called me delightful!”
We had to fight our way to the cart. Imani dispatched a crew to help us grind our way down there. There were still dozens of the Krakaren monsters in the halls and on the tracks. I had no idea how the hell the goat team had survived in this. Reports from around the dungeon were that the waves were still thick everywhere. I knew we could be overwhelmed at any moment, so we needed to hurry.
Both Li Jun and Li Na were ferocious fighters. Li Jun was like a damn kung fu master, flipping through the air and grabbing tentacles and throwing the monsters. Li Na was similar, though she twirled and wrapped the monsters in her chains, paralyzing them, allowing Zhang to cast a spell called Dirt Clod that pummeled them to death with rocks.
All three of them, it turned out, had an immunity to acid attacks. After the incident with the Brindle Grubs on the second floor, it was something all three looked for in their respective classes. I didn’t blame them.
The cart, thankfully, remained where we left it. The monsters had ignored it. It was turned on and facing stop 24, but there weren’t many creatures coming from that direction anymore. Katia set up at the back of the cart, facing backward to take down anything that gave chase. Zhang, Mongo, Li Jun, and his sister stood guard in the middle of the cart while Donut and I took to the cockpit. We had but minutes to get on and get going before a new wave of red dots would descend upon us.
I hit the throttle, and we were off.
My immediate worry was station 24. The last time we passed it, we’d been jumped by Krakaren babies. I knew they’d all gone inside to pull their escape tunnel bullshit, but surely there were more hanging out at the station, just waiting for some dumbasses to stroll on by.
And sure enough, as we blasted past the station, a single Krakaren stood on the platform. This one was huge, a massive octopus thing with swirling tentacles. A neighborhood boss, probably just as big, if not bigger, than the one we’d fought on the second floor. Luckily it was half-slopped onto the track, its giant tentacles casually hanging over the edge of the platform. We hit it with the portal, and it teleported the whole thing away, leaving a wet spot on the tiles as we continued to zoom toward the trainyard. I eased off the throttle after that, coasting to a stop just before we left the tunnel and entered the massive cavern that housed the trainyard.
We needed to get this cart onto the employee line, facing the deeper levels. In order to do that, we had to maneuver the cart to the entrance of the employee line with the portal facing the opposite direction it faced now.
The problem with that was two-fold. One, this cart was a different gauge than the employee line. The wheels were too close together, so we wouldn’t be able to drive it on the tracks. And two, in order to get it there, we had to physically pick up the cart and carry it across dozens of other tracks, all through an area crawling with both ghouls and minions of the mimic.
We eased out of the tunnel and paused, taking in the massive cavern. The main, fenced-in area of trainyard E was still a good half of a mile away. I could see the wrecked remnants of the giant fence. The massive gate still stood, and so did the real administrative building. I could smell the acrid stench of burnt wood and bodies.
The walls here were dotted with dozens of cave entrances, and the ground was filled with just as many train tracks. Corpses lay everywhere, mostly ghouls, but there was a good number of crawlers sprawled throughout.
There had to be five hundred or more monsters between here and the trainyard. Most of them were south of us, near the old building and fence.
The mimic itself was too far away to attack us directly, though I knew from dozens of frantic messages that the monster’s minions and ridiculously-long tongue were causing havoc upon anyone in the area. It loomed huge in the distance, as tall as the chamber, only half-pretending to be a building now. A pair of blimp-sized red eyes glowed. One of the towers in the trainyard collapsed as we watched, though I couldn’t see what had knocked it over.
A group of several dozen crawlers were holed up in that burnt-out administrative building fighting off the waves of ghouls and the mimic’s minions, which were apparently nothing more than giant, car-sized mouths with centipede-like legs. If you chopped them in half, it just made two of them. I could see a few of them from our position in the tunnel. The strange mobs reminded me of those wind-up toys that were nothing but a chattering mouth.
There was another group of crawlers trapped inside of a lone train car in the yard itself, unable to leave because they were within reach of the massive city boss. I only heard about them second-hand, and I had no idea if they were still there or if they had survived.
There was a lot of that, in these last, desperate hours of the fourth floor. Cries for help. Rumors of groups in need.
You will not break me. Fuck you all. You will not break me.
We really needed to deal with this thing. The mimic. It was my goddamn fault it was here in the first place. But other than sneaking past the area, our mission for the moment didn’t involve the monster. I could possibly use the portal cart to teleport it away like we did before. But we were no longer in a tunnel, with the protection that a tunnel provided, and the monster could easily get at us from the side or above or any other angle before we maneuvered the track-based cart at it. It was just too risky.
The plan was to sneak along the wall until we got to the employee line and to carry the large cart in. Hopefully we’d remain undiscovered. We’d need to protect the cart while Elle brought the Nightmare up to meet us. Elle was already in the train, waiting for my signal to come down the track and meet us. She complained that Fire Brandy was being less than helpful and wouldn’t do anything without talking to me first. At least she allowed Elle to move the train.
But then I spied the pair of mantaur creatures guarding the entrance to the employee line, and I knew that plan was out the window. With all the chaos spreading in front of them, they hadn’t noticed us yet. I eased the silent cart backward, slipping it back into the tunnel and out of sight.
“Why did we stop?” Li Na asked.
“Hang on,” I said, thinking. I formed a fist and stared down at my glove. Mantaurs.
Carclass="underline" Hey Mordecai. Quick question. If I, uh, accidentally summon the war god Grull, how long do I have before he’s un-summoned?
Mordecai: Run. Don’t fight him. He’s goddamned invulnerable. You can’t kill him. Take my special brew potion. Run. Don’t look back.
Carclass="underline" Chill. I haven’t actually summoned him. It’s just a question.
Mordecai: By the gods, Carl. Don’t scare me like that.
Carclass="underline" So…?
I actually knew the answer to this already, as it was discussed in my cookbook, but I wanted to confirm it, and I wanted to make sure there was a record of me actually asking the question.