Something about Monroe Station was off.
It wasn’t that it was a small station, though it only had one blocked exit, a ticket kiosk, and a pair of restrooms. It reminded me a little of Chicago Station, though that had felt empty even before I’d killed the Rat Men who’d camped there. But Monroe had never been a hub station like the big ones. It was a single-line station with a bus stop but no other trains—a place to board or get off, but not to make a transfer.
No, the strange part was that Monroe was empty. It was the first station I’d found without anything. No monsters. No people. Nothing of value to take with me.
And because it hadn’t always been.
I looked around; a single bloody spear sat near the kiosk. That felt like a sign that I was on the right track. So did the bloody track on the ground—the bottom of a boot-print. Had Tori been wearing boots? Those were popular with the scene crowd when I was a kid, so maybe. If it wasn’t her, I had no idea who it could be.
The blood was concerning, but maybe it was monster blood, not hers. And the abandoned spear gave me hope that she was fighting—and leveling.
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Team: Hal Riley, Tori Vanderbilt, Calvin Rollins
Tutorial Dungeon: Redline Tunnels
Objective: Kill the Tunnel Lord (1/1)
Objective: Kill the Redline Wyrm (0/1)
Objective: Reach the Dungeon Exit (0/1)
Objective: Survive (0/1)
Time Limit: 14 Hours, Seven Minutes
The weirdest thing about Fullerton wasn’t that it was crawling with oversized bats that were all Levels Six to Eight. It wasn’t even that they’d been so easy to beat. It showed just how much the System’s stat points were helping me—that and two solid days’ experience at fighting.
It was that it, like most of the other stations, was supposed to be above ground.
The second weirdest thing was that it connected to Roosevelt, which was also underground—and which also wasn’t supposed to be.
Whatever the Consortium had done with their terraforming, it had not only sunk this station completely, but it had also built a copy of some other station to replace it. They’d also cut off about a third of the line on either side when they made their loop and put the whole thing well under Lake Michigan.
At some point, I needed to figure out how they’d done that, along with a hundred other questions I already had—and probably a thousand I hadn’t thought of yet. But for now, I just wanted to take a breather and wait for that damn Wyrm.
I had almost finished the circuit; I was about to hit Level Fifteen, and only a few stations remained. I’d fought Rat Men, slimes, and tentacle-covered things called Minor Reversed River Elementals. They fought with tentacles covered in acid; I’d had to cut every one of them off the squid-shaped things before they died.
Right now, I was breathing hard—I’d been pushing my Body and Mana to the limit. I’d spent two points in Body—both to fix battle damage against a River Beast that had attacked me at Harrison—and six in Awareness. The last two went to Mana.
I was still saving the Lock-Grip Gloves, just in case I needed a Body boost mid-combat.
My new spell was running—Power Surge. As I slammed the sledgehammer I’d looted from the hardware store cave into the last bat, the iron head flashed blue-white, and a surge of electricity rushed into the monster. Its experience orb was a bright purple. I stopped near the edge of the platform, which was well over three-quarters gone and being eaten faster with every pass.
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I’d found a couple of magical items.
The best piece I had was the Surge Protector. The shoulder pads made me look a lot like one of the Haymakers’ football jocks, but they gave me two Mana and one Body. My other magical item was…less immediately useful, at least for fighting. The Imbuing Rod was great for setting up tools, though. It could imbue a single weapon with my Power Surge, and it didn’t have to be my weapon, either.
That’s how I was powering the Weed Whacker. My Awareness was through the roof at twenty-two, and I was starting to see things—like how I could use my lightning magic to power all sorts of stuff.
I blinked. The sweat stung my eyes, but I resisted wiping it off; my hands were even filthier, and I had long practice at not wiping my face when I’d been working.
Power Surge was the key, it turned out—and the Imbuing Rod. If I cast it into a weapon quickly enough, I could keep the buff up indefinitely, and with some wiring I’d ripped out of a wall, that led to something that felt a little like how electricity used to work. I could probably use it to power one of those electric chainsaws back at the hardware cave, but I hadn’t seen another shop like it since leaving.
It had some other drawbacks, too. I could only put Power Surge on one weapon at a time. I’d been keeping it on my sledgehammer when I could, since the bats weren’t a big enough threat for me to pull the Weed Whacker out of my inventory.
I’d built a few new weapons in the few minutes of downtime I let myself have—the battery bombs were all but used up, and I wanted to save the last four for the Wyrm itself. But the one I was most proud of was my Weed Whacker. It had started out as a brush trimmer, but now it only looked vaguely like one. There wasn’t a motor, for one thing, or hand-grips. For another, the safety guard was gone.
It was a long pipe with a bit of wire running through it, along with a magnet and a spinning series of what looked like copper hammers for the Imbuing Rod to…imbue. Rotationally. On the far side, I’d attached a bunch of knives to the end of the pipe with some ball bearings out of someone’s skateboard.
The Imbuing Rod and Power Surge kept it running well enough, and it kicked serious butt, but using it was a trade-off; the spell tired me out faster than Lightning Bolt at the power level I needed to run the Weed Whacker, and the machine wasn’t too well-built.
Even so, it was my best weapon—my ace in the hole, for now. As I waited for the Redline Wyrm to pass by, I worked on it, adjusting the knives’ angle slightly and tightening bolts. I had to be getting close—there weren’t many more stations to go.
She’d either be at North and Clybourn or Clark and Division. Either that, or she’d be in the area I’d already cleared.
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North and Clybourn was a bust.
Just like Monroe Station, I found some evidence that Tori had been through here. But unlike the bat stations or the ones with slimes, there didn’t seem to be any monsters to fight—just Rat Man spears.
She’d definitely cleared this station out. I was gaining on her, and if she kept ahead of me, she’d run into Calvin.
Unlike at Monroe, Tori hadn’t looted everything that’d been nailed down here. The highlight was a convenience store—no food, but duct tape, a bunch of oil, and outside, a full rack of propane tanks. The damn things were still full, and I couldn’t carry them all, even in my inventory; I thought about venting the gas but decided I could do that any time. They were still pressurized, and I couldn’t put gas back into them later. I took what I could.
I sat down to wait for the train to pass again—it seemed to be getting faster as it ate more and more of the tunnel walls, but something about that convenience store rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t stop fidgeting. After a minute of thinking and thinking and puzzling, I stood back up. “Alright. What’s wrong in there?”
I couldn’t figure it out. All the shelves were right where they should be. Sure, they were stone, and sure, the ones where food should have been in a convenience store were empty. So were the coolers; there wasn’t a single water bottle here. I headed toward the cash register, stepping over a rubber-bottomed mud rug. No Rat Men hiding back there, either.
No, there wasn’t anything off about this. It had just been my imagination.
If I was right, though, the train would be here soon, and I’d be able to get to Clark and Division.
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The Redline Wyrm was definitely speeding up.
I barely got to Clark and Division Station before the snake’s headlight filled the tunnel behind me, and it sheered off the last of the central platform and started working its way toward the caves nearby as I headed into the caves. At the rate it was growing, it wouldn’t take long for it to eat into the stations.
I watched it pass by, breathing hard. The ground rumbled under my feet, and the snake disappeared into the semi-dark tunnel.
The Redline Wyrm: Level Twenty Dungeon Boss
Current Difficulty: Extreme
Extreme. Extreme was better than Impossible. We had a shot at this.
I just needed to find Tori. I had one station left to check—plus the ones I’d already cleared out—and just under thirteen and a half hours. We were running out of time.