“Fuck,” I said the moment I realized what it was. It had only fooled me for a pair of seconds, but it was enough. You idiot. I moved to flip the switch back to the abyss, but I hesitated. Too late. Too late. We were going to hit it. A long, fleshy appendage snaked from the end of the crossbeam, leading up into station 433.
We hit the crossbeam a moment later. There was a mighty thwum as the portal sucked it away.
We’d just accidentally teleported the entire station mimic city boss to trainyard E.
“Whoops,” I said.
“Bautista,” I said, stepping off the platform. I shook hands with the hairy, orange tiger man. He’d reached level 28. We’d stopped about 100 meters before the giant, swirling portal that led into the abyss. There was a wide space on either side, along with a small doorway that led to the now-collapsed interior walkway. A pair of crawlers, both human, stood guard. One had an enchanted, old-school sling. The thing crackled with purple and black energy. He twirled the weapon and shot a rock, likely aiming at one of the lizard monsters who crawled up and down the pit’s interior. The crawlers both cheered, presumably after scoring a direct hit.
“Hello, Carl,” Bautista said, clasping me on the shoulder. “You have saved us. Again.”
“We ain’t done yet,” I said, looking over the ragtag group. There were about 600 people gathered here. I quickly told him what had happened with the station mimic as I shook hands and traded fist bumps with dozens of crawlers, who ranged in level from the distressingly-low 18 to 30. Most were human, but there was a scattering of orcs and elves and other oddities.
“So we have to fight that thing again?” Bautista asked, sounding sick. “Carl, it’s a city boss, and it’s really strong. I don’t know how to kill it. If you chop a part off, it turns into a spider and crawls back to the whole. Bashing weapons don’t do anything. It’s magic resistant. Maybe blowing it up will work, but you’ll have to go big. Like really big.”
I stepped in front of the portal attached to the front of the cart and took a screenshot.
“Holy shit,” I muttered.
The station mimic was so large it took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at. It was significantly larger than I anticipated. The monster had taken up residence in the middle of the trainyard and hadn’t yet changed shape into anything. It looked as if the wall of the trainyard had moved, swallowing half of the station. Only after staring at the image did my brain start to figure it out. It was a potato-shaped blob the size of a neighborhood block. The damn thing reached all the way up to the ceiling, taking a huge portion of the yard. It seemed much too big, like the total mass was enough to mimic five or six or more stations.
The blob looked disturbingly like how Katia appeared when she was not formed into anything.
I thought of that group we’d accidentally teleported to yard E. They were probably dead. We’d sent them to the yard, and less than two minutes later, we’d sent that thing through the same portal. Maybe they’d gotten away. I hoped so.
It seemed much too big to be only a city boss. Which begged the question, how strong were those things at the stairwell stations? The province bosses? For fuck’s sake.
Carclass="underline" Elle. Do me a favor and ask your manager if there’s a secret way to kill a mimic.
I’d already looked it up in my book, and there wasn’t much in the monster section. There was a warning that mimics were all over the place on the 8th floor, but I had the impression they were more of a nuisance than a real threat, implying that this huge mimic was a new thing, or something no previous cookbook-owner had come across.
Elle: Are you about to do something really stupid, or have you done it already?
Carclass="underline" Both.
Elle: Hang on. Let me ask. Don’t get your hopes up.
I looked over at Donut, who was preening at the attention of the other crawlers. She was mounted on Mongo while a group of people surrounded her and the dinosaur. She talked animatedly, telling them about the ride up here.
Katia held back shyly, leaning up against the side of the cart. People kept looking at her. Everyone by now knew exactly what had happened, but that golden, shining skull over her head was hard to ignore. I watched as Bautista approached her and held out his hand. They shook and started talking.
I walked up to the massive portal that overlooked the abyss, and I took a screenshot. The cart behind me with the much-smaller portal led to yard E. This one led to yard H. There was no mimic here. I could see the interdiction cart, the one that had been playing the Def Leppard song. This one hadn’t flipped and was sitting stopped a short distance away, having gotten itself wedged against the wall. The portal appeared to still be on. It’d jumped the track at the service bay but remained upright until it hit the cavern wall which, thankfully, hadn’t teleported the entire cave system away. I didn’t see any mobs, though there were dozens of corpses spread throughout the abandoned trainyard.
Elle: She says you don’t fight giant mimics. Little ones are easy to kill if you know what they are, but this thing is a whole different story. If you slice part of them off, the pieces grow legs and return to the main body. If you can get more than 50% of the mass off the main body at once, it’ll no longer be able to heal or transform. And then it’ll be vulnerable. But the separated pieces, unable to return to the main body, will instead attack you. They only die when the mimic dies.
Carclass="underline" Well that’s terrifying. And that’s only a city boss.
Elle: Yeah. I’m on my way back to the crew now, but I just talked a group out of attacking the province boss at station 48. One day we might be strong enough to fight one of those things, but it ain’t gonna be on this floor. Fuck that. You can hear it screaming from here.
I walked back to the cart and took one more screenshot. The mimic appeared to be forming into a large building, though it was still in mid-transformation. It was taking the shape of an Iron Tangle administrative structure, though it had so much mass, it had to make the building huge. A mouth that had to be 300 feet wide comprised the entire first floor. Each jagged tooth was the size of a person. A red, lumpy, train-sized tongue lolled out of the mouth, reaching off screen.
The entire building and mouth was faced directly at the portal. I knew if I took another screenshot in a minute, the mouth would be gone, and only the building would remain.
It’s waiting for us.
Carclass="underline" Sorry, Donut.
Donut: WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
I climbed back into the cockpit and turned the switch. The portal to trainyard E shut off. I looked down at Bautista where he stood next to Katia. “New plan. We go through the abyss portal instead of the cart portal. I have enough hats in my inventory for everybody here, so we don’t need to worry about fighting this mimic thing. It’s expecting us, and if we go through that portal, we’d be like pigs walking to slaughter.
Bautista looked relieved. “Thank god for plan B.”
“That was actually plan C,” Katia said.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I said to Donut as we watched the last of the hat-wearing group make their way through the portal to yard H.
“You have to tell them to give the hats back after we go through,” she said. “Millions of gold, Carl. Millions!”
“They weren’t ours to begin with,” I said. “People gave them to us to help others.”