I sighed, thinking of everything we needed to do. Part of me really wished we had a hundred or more of these carts. That way we could strategically park them around the stairwells. But as it was, they had so many entrances that it wasn’t feasible. Plus we only had one Growler Gary. We still didn’t know how long until the portal carts would reach the abyss. The level timer was now at two days and twenty hours. That meant we had just over a day until Mordecai returned. I wondered if we had enough time to go back to the trainyards to build a few more train bombs. That’d be a great way to farm more experience.
And while we were now seeing mobs suffering stage-3 of the DTs, we still hadn’t seen what happened when the DTs killed them. I had a suspicion of what was going to be, but how that would be implemented, I had no idea.
“Carl,” Donut called. “You pissed off the ghouls. Now they’re heading toward us!”
Sure enough, with the tunnel officially sealed off, the ghouls being generated at 72 had stopped heading toward 36 and now were coming this way. I could already see them shuffling up toward us on the edge of my map.
Shit, I thought, thinking once again of Growler Gary. We’d collected one extra pair of hands from the poor gnoll, but it turned out we were actually one pair short.
I couldn’t use the portal carts to protect the others, but we could certainly use it to protect ourselves right here and right now.
“Guys,” I said, “help me position one of the carts on the track. Then we gotta go talk to Gary again.”
We placed the turned-on portal into the tunnel, blocking it like a cork. The blister ghouls didn’t even pause. They dropped like lemmings right into the abyss. We had the cart parked at the edge of the vermillion line. My explosion appeared to have knocked the power out. We had to run the carts off of battery power, but that was fine. I now had plenty of them.
We had the second cart, the one with two fresh hands lashed to it, pointed in the other direction on the track. Only a handful of additional stage-three monsters had appeared over the past few hours. According to the prattle on my chat, the stage-three monsters were mostly heading toward station 24. They were running down the tracks, reaching outrageous speeds. But they were also coming up from the trainyards, so they were either riding the rollercoaster line—though I didn’t know how—or they were getting portaled there. I suspected maybe those neighborhood bosses at the Krakaren drug dens had something to do with that. But the monsters weren’t actually entering stop 24. They would stop and camp just outside of the station, oftentimes fighting with one another.
The few who did come down our track from the north did not voluntarily throw themselves into the pit. Instead, they stood there at the edge, growling and snapping with their round mouths while I observed them through the distorted haze of the tunnel-width portal.
We’d spent the past few hours grinding against the constant stream of ghouls. I’d turn off the south-facing portal, and we’d advance and kill. I practiced with my xistera some, and Donut was practicing with mounted attacks. Katia practiced with forming spikes on her arms and using them as weapons.
She also spent some time in her smaller form with Eva’s saber. The description said it was part of a set and only magical when the two weapons were together. Otherwise, the enchanted saber, called The Left Fang of the Green Sultan, offered no buffs or powerups. That was good, however, as it meant Eva had also lost her main weapon.
The level-20 ghouls did not pose a serious challenge, but they were useful for practicing new techniques, if not for experience.
The stage-three monsters, I knew, would be a much better trial. We had a new technique we needed to try out, and it required a higher-tier, stronger monster to test it on.
While the DT monsters didn’t voluntarily throw themselves into the portal, I knew I could curate our battle experience on that side easily by hopping onto the cart and pushing it forward, sucking in the stage-three monsters until there was only one left. The portal, when tuned to the abyss, was unforgiving. Like with the rope we tried earlier, if just a tiny portion of the creature touched the edge of the magical gateway, the whole thing was sucked in like a strand of spaghetti.
Bautista was giving me a running update of all the oddities that were raining into the abyss. We still had an estimated two hours left before the carts would arrive. We didn’t know for certain that all three carts were still moving, but I was hopeful based on the sheer amount of stuff falling into the pit.
We weren’t ready for how powerful the stage-three monster was. The thing was stronger than a regular neighborhood boss. The system didn’t allow us to properly examine the creatures through the window of the portal’s backside, so I couldn’t read the description until we were ready to fight.
But one thing was obvious even before I turned off the portal. It didn’t matter what sort of monster was the original source of the creature, whether it be a massive ogre or a tiny, rat-sized mob. By the time they reached stage-three of the DTs, they were all pretty much the same creature: a hippo-sized monstrosity with thrashing tentacles on its back. Instead of a normal face, they held nothing but a round mouth circled with teeth. There was a skull there, visible through its transparent, jelly-like skin, a talisman of the creature it once was. For this one, it was a small skull, much smaller than the bear-like skulls we’d seen before. The creatures looked over-inflated, like they’d explode at any moment. The things bulged with veins, reminding me of the second boss we faced, the Juicer. The tentacles were thick and meaty, with round, thrashing mouths at the end.
“Okay, get ready,” I said to Katia. Donut stood back with Mongo on the platform while I sat up on the raised cockpit of the rapid-response cart. I was afraid the monster would trash the cart, so the plan was to back it up and out of danger. I’d then leap down to engage while Katia did her thing from the edge of the platform.
Katia rolled back and formed into the sentinel gun. Three, spider-like legs formed, turning her into a tripod. The flesh-colored shield went up, and the automatic crossbow, which had been sitting in her inventory, appeared, locking into place just behind the shield. A firing slit formed, which she could open and close like a mouth.
“I’m ready,” she said. She’d formed a pair of eyes and a mouth just behind and above the lump of flesh that held the crossbow, allowing her to peer down onto her target. The plan was to eventually form eyes strategically on the exterior of the large, half-moon shape shield, but she wasn’t quite ready for that.
“Okay, here we go,” I said.
I pushed forward with the cart, and the single monstrosity scattered back, having seen his friends sucked away earlier. I reversed the throttle and quickly backed up, turning off the portal that blocked the tunnel. I jumped from the cart’s cockpit, crunching onto the gravel. The monster continued to run away for a good ten or twelve more seconds before realizing he’d been bamboozled. Now a distant speck down the track, he stopped and turned back toward us. He howled indignantly, turned, and charged.
Razor Fox. Level 22.
Warning: This mob is suffering from the DTs. It is in stage three of three.
In stage three, this mob’s form has changed, and it bears very little resemblance to its original self. Kind of like how all you humans did after you finally got out of quarantine. It is now covered with multiple tentacles. If this monster has recently fed on another living creature, the contents of its stomach may be quite valuable. Or toxic. Or explosive. Or worse. That’s what makes these guys so fun.