“Don’t, don’t hurt them,” Katia cried, finally recovering. “Not the other daughters. They don’t know what’s going on.”
“Push them back,” Donut yelled at the three Heklas. The daughters started to recover from their shock, howling in outrage at Donut’s desecration of Hekla’s corpse.
“Clockworks first!” I yelled at Donut. “Keep the real Hekla back. We need to loot her damn corpse!”
One of the clockwork Hekla’s heads exploded. Sparks and little electronic pieces showered as it was hit with a second electrical bolt, cast by one of the daughters. The other two Heklas continued to push the others back and out the door into the gangway and then to the next car. In addition to the remaining daughters, at least a hundred other crawlers filled the car, which was packed to the brim. They yelled as one, confused and afraid at the sight of one of the dungeon’s most famous crawlers lurching toward them. I chased after the minion. I tried to pull the crossbow off Hekla’s back, but it wouldn’t come. As I pulled, I looked down and saw the square access panel in the gangway’s floor.
“Katia, we need to get the Vermillion key from Hekla’s corpse. It has to be you since you killed her. Get the key first. And then everything else you can grab. Hurry.”
“Why?” Donut asked. She shot a magic missile past undead Hekla’s legs. One of the daughters fell back, crying, grasping her knee. “Why do we need the key?”
Katia, to her credit, recovered quickly. She rushed forward. “Where’s Eva?” she cried as she reached for the undead Hekla.
We’d placed blocks so the doors to the two engine cars could close, but not lock, so we didn’t need the keys. If I wanted to disengage this car, however, I still needed it. My first instinct was to take this engine and get the fuck out of here. Hopefully somebody else would have presence of mind to get to that other engine and pull it out of the station.
A part of me screamed, this is a douche move. You’re abandoning 1,000 people. They needed to know how to disengage the slave mode to pull the train. Surely someone would figure it out. It was just one button. Still, I thought. What if they didn’t?
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“It doesn’t let me loot from her while she’s a minion,” Katia shouted.
The second clockwork Hekla exploded after it was speared in the chest. Donut leaped to my shoulder.
Out on the platform, the last of the crawlers retreated into the train. A trio of monstrosities leaped down the stairs. Holy shit, what were those things? They had blinking, red exclamation marks over their heads. Those are stage three monsters. We needed to go.
“Katia, the very moment that minion dies, get the key. Then get her crossbow. Then loot the shit out of everything you can.”
One of the monsters jumped at the train, bouncing off the wall of the passenger car. It looked like it’d once been a skull-faced, bear-sized monster. The DTs had transformed it. Tentacles erupted from its back, reminding me of the mold lions from Grimaldi’s circus. But those tentacles had been thinner, parasitic. This was different. The tentacles were a part of the creature. Very… Krakaren-like.
Fuck. We don’t have time for this.
The original plan was to disengage the drive on this first engine car, walk all the way to the back of the train and re-engage that second engine, turning it into the primary one. In theory, however, with that second engine still in slave mode, we didn’t need to do that. The train would work fine from this cab no matter which direction we went, though we’d be driving blind.
I didn’t have a choice, not with a thousand people suddenly on the train and in imminent danger. We needed to stay here and drive the train backwards. That’d be difficult if we were dead.
“We need to close the door!” I cried.
At that moment, the Hekla minion collapsed, having been hit with a spell. She tumbled in the gangway, blocking the door. Donut fired another missile at a woman, who rocketed back, health halfway down.
I jumped forward and grabbed the Hekla corpse by the legs and pulled it back into the cab. “Close the door! Close the door!” Katia grabbed the sliding door, kicked away the block, and slid it closed, locking it, just as it rocked with a pair of spells. I knew from experience nobody would get in without a key, not in an engine car. Hopefully none of the other daughters actually had keys.
I looked down with horror to realize Hekla’s body had been ripped in half. All we’d dragged into the car was her legs and half of her torso. Her glowing breastplate, and more importantly, the crossbow that’d been slung over her back, was on the other side of the wall.
The train rocked again as one of the monsters slammed against it. The creatures’ tentacles grasped at the doors to the passenger cars. I jumped up and to the controls. I pushed the train into reverse mode, and I added power to the throttle. The train vibrated ominously, and I feared it wouldn’t go, or the back cars would smash together like they had during that last crash, but the train started to move. Slowly at first, but then it gathered speed. We left the station, moving back down the track. Behind me, the door banged and crashed as the daughters desperately tried to break it down.
By the time we cleared the platform, it was filled with tentacle-covered creatures. I took a deep breath. I kept my eyes on the receding platform. One of the monsters jumped into the channel. Then another. The platform quickly moved away from view. I slowed the train, but only a little. Hopefully these things weren’t that fast.
“Where did Eva go?” Katia asked again. She had an odd, distant quality to her voice. She’s in shock.
Behind us, the door continued to bang.
“She went out the window. I don’t know if she died or not. I didn’t see her when we pulled away.”
“She’s alive,” Katia said. “She’s still in my chat.”
I nodded. Holy shit. It had all happened so fast. Hekla was dead. Hekla was fucking dead. Katia had killed her. She’d gone from level 24 to 37, which was insane.
“Have you seen your level yet?” I asked Katia.
“Have you seen yours?”
Surprised, I checked. I’d gone up two levels to 34. Donut had gone up two to 32.
I suspected while Katia had gotten a lot of experience for being a living battering ram, the lion’s share of that experience that had rocketed her up the ranks actually came from killing Hekla. I still wasn’t clear on how sharing worked, but we probably hadn’t gotten a share of that. But two levels at once was a big deal. Now all we needed to do was get out of this.
“You know, you’re probably the highest-level crawler in the dungeon now,” I said after a moment. “Last I saw, Lucia Mar was 35, and that was just a few hours ago.”
Katia said nothing. The train rumbled over the tracks, riding much more roughly than our trip up here. We were all still covered in gore. The room was filled with it. I looked at my hands, marveling at all of the blood.
Katia turned to look at Hekla’s legs. She put her hand to her mouth and just stood there for a moment. “I didn’t mean to kill her.”
Donut leaped from my shoulder to hers. “When I killed that guy, I didn’t mean to do it either. But he had it coming, and Hekla had it coming even worse. She was going to kill you.”
The door banged again. They weren’t letting up. If anything, their bangs against the door were getting more frantic. I looked nervously down at Hekla’s half-body. The loot dialog did not pop up.
“Hey, did you get the key?”
“I got it,” Katia said. “Not that it matters now.”
I relaxed. They would never get in here. At least not through that door. “True. But we don’t want them having it, either.” I paused, seeing the look in Katia’s eyes. I recognized it for what it was. That moment before the collapse. I reached out and grabbed her arm to steady her.