Welcome to Banshee Station 116. Yellow Line.

I had been keeping my map zoomed in because it gave more detail that way. Now I opened it out as far as it would go.

"I can see the whole area on the map," I said. "Multiple tunnels leading to the platform, but the area isn't that big. There are a lot of twisting tunnels and two big rooms. One is what looks like a boss room like the ones on the first floor. There aren't any safe rooms. I see a pair of the bathrooms, though. Weird. There aren't any on the trains."

"And there's a lot of red-tagged mobs coming," Donut said. "Let's go that way. I don't see any monsters that way."

The path she was pointing at was a cave scooped out of the stone wall of the platform, stretching back into darkness. It was dank, water dripping from the walls to form stubby stalactites and stalagmites that grew together like teeth closing infinitesimally slowly. It smelled like fog in the bad part of town. Donut released Mongo from his pokeball cage and we jogged down the indicated tunnel without question.

"Did Vernon tell you what's at this station?" Carl asked.

"Cornets," I said. "He described them as 'skinned rabbit with a nasty scream. Messes with your head.'"

Carl grunted.

We rounded a corner, putting ourselves out of sight of the platform. Donut activated her Torch spell and we moved far enough down that the light wouldn't be visible from the platform, then paused to regroup. I could see a half dozen Cornet. Level 21 mobs trickling onto the platform behind us.

"There has to be a shitload of these Cornets here," Carl said. "If monsters get on at every train, every ten minutes, all day long, then there has to be a constant stream of them."

"This station is big, but it's not huge," I said.

"Then they're either somehow getting back here after they get off at station 125—like how Vernon was getting back to the yard—or the system is creating more of them. They did that with the Brindle Grubs back on the second floor, although Mordecai said it was only the janitor mobs they do that with. There's a limited number of the others and if you kill them they don't come back."

"Poor Vernon," I said, moving on from the topic of depopulation. "That was horrible."

"Yeah. Plus those bugs burned up my prize," Donut said sadly. "It's not fair."

"You guys heard him say that he was doing the loops so he could save up money to buy his wife a new house, right?" I asked. "How does that work if it takes three days to get to the end of the line and this floor has only been around for a day? They create them right before we come down, right?"

"There is no wife and he wasn't here two days ago," Carl said. "And there was no prize. The ants were your prize, Donut. I guess we need to be more vigilant about traps from now on. I need to figure out how to train my Find Traps skill. It warned me, but much too late. My pedicure buff gives me a few extra seconds if the trap is foot triggered, but obviously there are other types of traps too."

I started to say that Carl's pedicure kit might be the weirdest and most disturbing thing I'd seen in the dungeon thus far. Yes, he only had to spend fifteen minutes using it once every 30-hour Syndicate day and in exchange he got invulnerable feet, bonus foot-attack damage, a bonus to his Smush skill that let him kill with a stamp, and a warning about footfall-based traps. Pretty amazing deal...except the only reason he had gotten it was that the AI had a foot fetish. Carl using the kit to get those benefits would be like me doing a striptease in the shower in exchange for good loot boxes from my fans.

I decided not to say that.

"What do you mean there is no wife?" I asked. "I don't think he was lying. By the end of it he was too drunk to lie."

"No," Carl said. "He believes, or I guess believed, he had a wife that was waiting for him, but that was just fake memories. The last crawl he was probably a dwarf doing something else. Whatever the fourth floor theme was the last time they ran the dungeon. It's all part of the story. He says he can go home, but where's that? There is no home. No wife. It's really fucked up because these aren't computer programs. These are actual, living creatures who believe this is the real world."

"That's...horrible," I said.

He nodded. "It's just as bad as what they've done to us."

Anger flashed through me. "I'd say having my entire family murdered is a little worse than—" I cut myself off. I couldn't afford to fight with Carl. "Yes, it's pretty bad."

Fortunately, Donut jumped in before Carl could snap back at me. "So what's the plan?" She reached out from where she was sitting on Carl's shoulder and put her paw against the side of the cave wall. It came away slimy. She frowned. "This place is disgusting."

Carl looked at me for a moment and then let it go. "Donut, find us a tunnel with just one Cornet. Let's get a sense of these guys. Afterwards, we'll hit the boss room. We can get the map and maybe we can figure out why they're always getting on the train. Like with the NPCs, they can create them, give them a story, and set them free, but they're not robots. There has to be a reason why they're getting on the train and getting off. The more we know about this place, the better our chances of figuring out how to get the hell out of here."

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"Right," Donut said. She pointed. "Down that way."

We moved where she pointed. It was frustrating...my map was far larger, but her Acute Ears skill meant that her map showed monsters sooner and better when there was stealth or ambushes involved. It would have been great if I could have acquired that skill somehow.

"It's up ahead," Donut said. "Just a couple of turns that way."

"Right." Carl strode on, his fist clenching to summon his gauntlet...and then paused and held up his hand in a 'halt' signal.

I froze. He must have detected a trap, or an ambush, or something. I waited for a chat message that would clarify.

After a few seconds I whispered, "Guys?"

"Hang on," Carl replied at normal volume. "We're talking to our PR agent."

"Now?"

The Cornet was just ahead of us, immediately around the corner. It had paused and I could hear a faint hum and a tink, tink noise.

"Katia, you need to grow a mohawk," Donut said suddenly. "And maybe get a catchphrase. That really worked for Carl."

"What?" The monster was right there, why were we talking about my fashion choices?

"Goddamnit, Donut," Carl muttered.

"What are you talking about?" I asked. I pulled a bit of my hair around in front of me. It was shoulder-length and blonde and I thought I had done a good job making it look real. Why did I need to change it? And why a mohawk of all things?

"She doesn't mean anything," Carl said. "It's not important right now."

"It is important, Carl. We shouldn't avoid conversations just because they're uncomfortable. Katia, Zev thinks since you're hanging with us, you need to be more vibrant."

"More vibrant? Is she saying I'm boring?"

"No," Donut said with a moment of hesitation that clearly meant 'yes'. "She just thinks you'll get more followers if you give the viewers something to latch onto. It's not a bad thing. But people need to know who you are. You have to give them something to root for."

"My views have never been higher," I protested. "I have ten billion followers. It was almost nothing until I joined your team."

"Oh you precious thing," Donut said, in the most condescending voice I'd heard since grammar school. "It's great, it really is, but those are rookie numbers. I have over 700 trillion."

Carl sighed. "Look, this isn't the time for...oh, fuck."

The rabbit monster had heard us talking and was moving towards us quickly. Mongo growled and fluttered his wings aggressively.

"Formation two," Carl said.

Formation two was exactly the same as formation one except that we charged instead of staying put and defending. And that Donut was supposed to jump off of Carl's shoulder and hang back, firing Magic Missiles from the back row.

We were halfway to the corner when the Cornet came into view. It was utterly revolting. It looked like a two-meter anthropomorphic bipedal rabbit with spindly arms and overly long, floppy ears that would have been adorable if the entire creature hadn't been skinned alive. It was an eyeless mass of red, oozing flesh with size-55 bloody footprints behind it and far too many teeth in its distorted mouth. I felt my gorge rising as I looked at it.

No, wait. That wasn't my disgust, it was the humming. It came from the rabbit and resonated off the walls, making the floor vibrate beneath my feet.

The rabbit dropped a potion bottle; the tough glass hit the ground and bounced as the monster advanced.

"It just took a potion," Carl said. "Watch out!"

Red Cornet. Level 21.

Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?

The Cornet is a devolved form of the more common Lepus, one of the most widespread, semi-intelligent species across the known universe. During the early years of the Skull Empire's expansion, a system warlord developed a taste for a dish called Lepus hasenpfeffer, which caused the Lepus on that planet to be hunted to near extinction. A band of the hunted fled to the extensive, lightless caves of the planet and disappeared for several thousand years.

The devolved Lepus lost its sight, but it developed its rudimentary echolocation skills into an impressive attack. They don't normally run around without skin. We just added that part because it makes them scary as shit.

Donut shot it in the head with two missiles, knocking it to the ground. It screamed and the sound pierced through my head. A wave of nausea washed over me, my vision got blurry, and suddenly I was on my hands and kneeds vomiting. From the corner of my eye I could see Carl on the stone beside me.

You've been rendered Queasy!

There was an avian shriek. Mongo leaped past us and landed on the Cornet, ripping it apart with feet and beak.

The humming stopped and with it the steadily building nausea and pain in my ears. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve (forgetting that I wasn't wearing one and it was just my arm) and rolled over to flop on the cool stone.

Carl: Mordecai. We're fighting walking rabbits that make us puke. The debuff is called Queasy. How do we fight it?

Mordecai: That's usually from an auditory attack. Putting in earplugs won't help. I can whip you up a potion that'll negate it, but that won't do you any good right now. Were Donut and Mongo affected?

Carl: Donut yes, Mongo no.

Mordecai: Okay. I honestly don't know how these attacks work. They're not magical. It's a physical thing, but it only works on certain anatomies. You're going to have to lead with Mongo. The good news is your body quickly builds up a natural resistance to this sort of attack. This is a real thing that exists outside the dungeon, designed to incapacitate prey. My advice is to fight a few more of these guys in as small groups as possible until it no longer affects you. You'll probably get a skill notification called Queasy Resistance or something.

I moaned. This was going to be miserable.

"Ugh," Carl said, echoing my thoughts. "This is going to suck."

I wobbled over to the potion bottle that the monster had dropped and picked it up. I had to lean on the wall to do it which meant getting my hand filthy. The bottle was the size and shape of a potion bottle but it clearly wasn't one, since those poofed away when used. Although...there was still a few drops of liquid at the bottom, so maybe it counted as not fully used. I checked its properties to find out what kind of potion it was.

Used vial.

That was unhelpful. "What do you make of this?" I asked Carl.

"Toss it here."

I tossed it over to him. He did all the same things I had done—looked at it, read the description, looked at the liquid inside. He pulled it in and out of his inventory, which was a good idea that I hadn't thought of. He tapped it on the wall to get the liquid out, then smashed it on the ground. It promptly disappeared, leaving no trace behind.

Well, there went any chance of solving the mystery.

"Damn," he said. He sighed and dusted off his hands. "Okay, let's keep going."