Maddy: The center of the place had something called a Krakaren, and it was dealing drugs to keep the other monsters doing, I dunno, whatever it wanted them to?

  Sandra: Oh my God why weren't you responding!

  Sandra: Sam is angry but she loves you.

  Mom had obviously said something truly unreasonable and Sandra had refused to repeate it.

  Maddy: Well, I was fighting a giant tentacled monster. I ignore messages during things like that.

  Sandra: You were silent for more than a day!

  I didn't realize it had been that long. My guess would have been four hours.

  Maddy: It took me a bit to figure out how to stop it from healing itself.

  Sandra: Look, we know how to get from Gamboge to Cantaloupe. We're trying to make progress that way, but try to get as far towards us as you can.

  Maddy: Sure. What's the route?

  I copied the route into my scratchpad.

  Sandra. Your mother said that she loves you, and that she set a timer on her watch so she can pray every hour for your safe return.

  Route planned out, I waited in the subway station, perched among the stalactites. As I waited for the next train, I thought about how that had gone.

  Between the Krakaren, all three Pooka-goats, and about 200 mobs, I'd gone from level 16 to level 20, and I could feel how much better all my skills were, especially light on your feet.

  I checked my notifications and found out that light on your feet had, by some miracle, caught up with ignore fatigue, reaching level 15. In addition to feeling like I could do a standing jump to around twenty feet, the improvement gave it an incredible ability: Double Jump. Once per minute, you can push off a air as though it were a solid object.

  I tried it, falling loose and then kicking off of nothingness to get back up to the ceiling. I didn't even need to trigger anything on my hotbar, I just had to think of how I intended to move. That was a game-changer, and entirely because I'd spent the day running around on that beast's tentacles.

  Admittedly, it had given me this Rev-Up addiction debuff, but I had supplies to handle that for longer than this dungeon would last.

  I felt myself smiling. Perhaps more importantly, I now had a path back to Mom. Now I just needed a path to Lacie.

  Unfortunately, knowing where they were didn't make them near me. I was going to have to transfer five times to reach them, likely spending days on the rails to get there. It wasn't a good way to level, but they were right about something: I wanted to see Mom again.

  Even though I was angry, I desperately wanted to just hug her for a minute, hopefully without her yelling at me.

  As long as she didn't find out about the rev-up—I'd spent three hours in a bathroom filling vials which I could use from my inventory's hotbar, so I expected I could keep it a secret—there was a chance she'd take a break from critiquing my decisions.

  The first step was taking the Gamboge up to 97 and transfering to the Eggplant. It was easy to slip in after the monsters left—they were in for quite the surprise—and then ride along behind the train.

  Whenever the train reached a station, I sprinted to the back, killed that car's contents while hanging off the rear, then slowly killed forward. I also found a janitor who tried and failed to hurt me and a conductor who seemed harmless.

  Near the front was a prize car, which seemed weird. I asked for suitcase number 97, figuring maybe the next stop I was going for would be lucky, and I was well rewarded. The suitcase was filled with some clothes and a Bronze Ring of +1 Intelligence.

  We were almost to the next stop, so I wiped out another train of minor monsters before getting into it, but man was I excited. This was definitely a girl's suitcase, and while the bra wouldn't fit, there was a white dress shirt that would, so my acid-pitted bra was no longer the only thing beneath the barely-there magical mesh top, and there was one pair of leggings to replace my almost-dissolved pair. They were an ugly shade of green and fit a bit too tight, but I did not care. They covered my legs.

  Dressed a bit better, I got back to wiping out train-cars of creatures. As long as I handled the load from one station before the next arrived, it was easy.

  Gamboge-97 had a small cluster of crawlers, none of whom had heard of Lacie. I also paused a moment in the safe room to open boxes.

  Three more bronze adventurer boxes, which the system seemed to hand out for tripping over your own feet, as well as:

  Bronze Boss Box (4/7)

  Gold Ring of Charisma +3.

  Bronze Boss Box (5/7)

  2 Scrolls of Heal.

  Potion of Invisibility.

  Bronze Boss Box (6/7)

  Box of Fine Healing Potions.

  Potion of Invisibility.

  Silver Boss Box (8/8)

  Box of Fine Healing Potions. (20)

  Potion of Invisibility x3.

  Honestly, that seemed weak for how much of a pain that Krakaren had been. Not exactly a surprise, but it felt ridiculous that everyone said the AI gave you gear you needed and I still didn't have any ice skates. No, instead it gave me charisma, which seemed to do precisely nothing, heals I almost never used, and invisibility potions that were redundant with Hide in Shadows most of the time.

  Well, no good prizes. I poured my stats into dexterity and loaded up on crawler crackers.

  "How can you eat those?" Crawler Nicolas Everrett III - Level 23 (not the third crawler with that name, the III was in his real name) groaned.

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  "They start tasting good once you're ravenous," I said, then headed to the Eggplant line.

  It left just before I arrived.

  I thought a moment, then jumped down. Kicking between the rails, skating for all I was worth, I started really moving. On the one hand, it was a stupid maneuver, as being away from a train meant I wasn't gaining experience, but it felt good to see how fast I could go.

  With steel rails to slide along, I got going shockingly fast. I skated through 101 as the next train came into sight behind me, which gave me the motivation to beat it to 103 by almost two minutes.

  The crawlers there hadn't met Lacie, so I didn't bother stopping.

  Transfering to the Falu went well, and this time I went to the trouble of boarding and killing everything I could find. Unfortunately, even killing what seemed like a thousand mobs did nothing I could see, which I guess wasn't surprising as they were incredibly easy to kill now.

  Transfering to the Coquelicot at 113 was where problems arose. "Something went wrong, and trains aren't coming," Crawler John Smith 47 - Level 22 said. He looked terrified. "The mobs are wandering in here now, too. At least I can grind without risking the trains."

  I nodded, headed out, then went back. "Hey, John."

  He came back over.

  "If you can't get on the trains, you're not gonna get through this floor."

  "You think I don't fucking know that." He gestured at the safe room where the rest of his party, three level 19's, were taking a meal break before heading back out. "We know what's happening here."

  "But like, don't just go down there and grind. Go as far as you can. Try to clear the line or something. Seriously, if you aren't pushing it, you won't survive this floor, and even if someone carries you here, you'll be dead on floor five."

  He scowled. "Lotta talk coming from someone who's only the same level as me."

  I hadn't noticed leveling from 21 to 22. Cool. Also, "If you think I'm not fine, watch as I walk through the next 26 stations of monsters without slowing down. I'm great. If you head up the line, you'll maybe find things thinned out as I cut through them, but I don't know if that's actually good for you."

  He slumped a bit, and I felt like a bitch.

  "I'm not trying to get you down. I just, well shoot. So, my coach always said if you aren't training to failure, you're not training. It hurts, and in this place it means you might die, but that's only a chance of dying. If you don't train up, there's no chances; the next floor will kill you, if some escalation at the end of this one doesn't. Sorry. I was trying to help."

  "Thanks." He glanced back at the others. "You're not wrong. I was already planning to try and get them out, it's just tough. Are you, well, really gonna clear it?"

  "Turns out my Mom's up at 106 on the canteloup, but I need to make it to 251 on the marigold to transfer," I explained. "I'm gonna kill stuff along the way, but I'm going for speed, so I'm not gonna stop and wipe a station or anything."

  "We'll be a bit behind you, so if you soften up some of those clusters but don't wipe them out, you might save some lives.

  I headed out. In the train tunnel, I just skated past a few, as they were fairly sparse. If I kept my speed up, I could slide across long patches on the wall, right near the ceiling, and skim past the desperate, drug-hungry beasts. Whenever I saw four or five in a tight cluster, I'd kill two with fastballs.

  The next station had half-kobold ogres, and it was fairly clear it was going to be deadly to John and his crew. The beasts were spilling off the platform, not progressing at all, backing up into a dense horde. I started sending my best fastballs in, pissing them off. As they turned on me, I backed off, stringing them out and picking them off. Once they were in a long chain, I raced past into the room and went up the walls to attack from higher up.

  Once they were thinned out, the issue was revealed: a pile of corpses, conducting from the third rail, had blocked the path.

  I obviously didn't want to get electrocuted, so I just started hurling fastballs into the mass. After a few, I realized that, if I aimed near the edge, the knockback would rip limbs out, tearing chunks off the electrocuted mass.

  By the time I had the blockage clear, I could hear fighting in the hallway.

  I jumped down and jogged back to those four.

  John Smith 47: Thanks for stringing them out.

  Aloud, he said, "Is it bad in there?"

  "I don't know how to rate that," I said, then sprinted into the room, applied a dozen ruptures with breaking-ball throws, and headed onwards.

  Worried about the people following along, I made a lot worse time. Still, it was going alright. As I reached Coquelicot-125, a panicked message came from John Smith 47.

  I didn't hesitate, sprinting back to find that another swarm had come out while they were passing 123. They'd gotten surrounded and were now huddled together under the lip of the platform. One of them had cleverly made some metal blocks to protect them, but that wasn't going to stop the Burled Curbles forever.

  The beasts were about ten feet tall, looking slim and lanky, but with tumorous growths all over them. Except each growth was actually a hugely muscled shoulder, with a powerful arm extending from it, so they had between four and seven arms in random locations. I aimed a fastball, tagged one in the temple, and dropped it in one. Easy, then.

  A hailstorm of pitches pounded into the crowd as I unleashed, and soon the beasts were rushing me. Their punches, which apparently also involved brass knuckles with big spikes, looked powerful, but were not hard to dodge; their many arms meant they kept getting in their own way. Once they got too dense, I skated backwards for distance.

  A minute later, some fiery bolts leapt into their backs, and the group of four was finishing them off.

  As I turned to go, Crawler Amira Muhammad 2, Level 20 Ifrit Thief, who looked terrifying but sounded meek, said, "Please, you could travel with us."

  I could see by the way she looked at him that John messaged her the instant she said it. All the same I headed back. "Look, I'm not trying to be harsh, but I missed my Mom last floor so we're still not in a party, and that's not happening again. I've got 128 more stations to the transfer point. You don't want to try the route I'm taking."

  Amira opened her mouth and Crawler Portia L, Level 19 Succubus Bard grabbed her arm, stopping her from saying anything.

  John spoke instead. "We appreciate what you've done, and you should go be with your family. Too few people in here have family left."

  I swallowed. They all thought they were going to die on their own, and he was trying to make me feel better about abandoning them. How was I going to feel when they ended up dead. "I'll slow down until the next transfer station. They said it's 127. If there's not enough there to group into something useful, we'll keep on until there is."

  Tension slipped from all their shoulders. There were no big groups in the way, and we reached 127 quickly. The transit station did have another party of crawlers, and I felt a lot better leaving that group of eleven people together.

  From there, I made better time. I killed stuff as I went, but generally maintained a good pace. All the same, it was a very, very long ways.

  It was almost another day to make it from Coquelicot-127 all the way to Coquelicot-197, and the other side of that station had the front of a pile-up for the Marigold line. Someone had blasted the engine car into shards halfway down the station, and more had just kept ramming into the back, destroying everything.

  It had happened a while ago, and the transit station was overrun. I dodged through and into the safe room, shocked to find a whole crowd of crawlers in there.

  "Why are you all in here?"

  The safe room door had either never existed or somehow been torn off, so nobody had noticed me enter. They stared for a moment. "Did you kill them all?"

  "No."

  There was a general sigh. "Thank goodness. Sorry, not trying to rain on your parade. We took a break for soup—this place has excellent ramen—but we're about to head back out for more grinding. Until someone figures out a route to the stairs, we're just trying to level, and a swarm outside a safe room like this is easy."

  I felt like the experience must be terrible, considering all of these were level 19 to 22—not that I was doing better—but I didn't say that. "I'll leave them, as much as I can, then."

  "How?" Someone asked, but I didn't explain as I got contacts of those who were willing.

  I could skate just fine in the safe room, and the thirty feet I had let me get going pretty well. I leapt out the door, clearing the mobs outside, skimming along the wall to launch over the stairs towards the Marigold line.

  I heard a, "Holy shit!" from behind me, which felt good. I got those occasionally when I was actually good at something, as opposed to just the best in a small school.

  Fortunately, nothing out here was dangerous. I could just ignore it all while hurrying down the line.