There were some dense parts on the Marigold, and I began experimenting with my Illegal Checking skill, which turned out to be extremely good.

  Illegal Checking.

  Why is it illegal? Because it breaks the laws... OF PHYSICS. A literal guitar riff sounded in my head whenever I read that line of the description. It was very weird. When you hit someone with a body-check, instead of conservation of momentum meaning your momentum and theirs is combined and distrubuted between the two of you, you keep all of your momentum and they get all of the combined momentum, so you keep moving and they go flying. Also, it's illegal checking because it's often fatal, and killing other players is illegal in most of your lame earth-sports.

  The description implied I wouldn't be hurt at all, but that was simply false. I took the regular impact, they took twice the impact, and I wasn't slowed down by the impact I took. It was complete nonsense for the physics of it, but very effective on the rails.

  With skate giving me massive amounts of speed and the momentum buff giving me boat-loads of constitution, if I hit a mob with my shoulder it went flying and I barely felt it. A few risky moments made it clear that, if I was careless I'd still get blocked in, but whenever a line was sparse I could just barrel down the center and send things flying out of the way. If I aimed properly, they'd fly sideways into the wall, which tended to kill regular mobs.

  Unfortunately, things piling up meant it was still only useful in sparse groups, and I could dodge through sparse groups anyways.

  Marigold-197 to -251 would have been a slog whatever the case, but that was also the first time I started seeing the DTs. Reading the description of a mob with stage-1 DTs, I had a small panic attack at the addiction this hellish place had saddled me with, but breathing exercises helped me refocus my self-control.

  I did, after all, only need the Rev-Up once a day. It had some nice benefits, too. It made me immune to disease, and whenever I took another shot, it healed me to full.

  The upside was that stage-1 DTs meant I could ignore everything. On effectively-open rails, I got up to 70 miles per hour. Then I hit Marigold-235.

  I slid into that station like any other, saw a swarm of perhaps a hundred five-foot fox-men turn my way, and a barrage of blades was incoming. I couldn't stop, so I kept going, dropping into a split, one leg forward and the other back, lying near-flat on a single rail. Most of the razor-darts went high, but about a few tore through my rear leg.

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  Razor Fox. Level 16.

  Warning: This mob is suffering from the DTs. It is in stage two of three. In stage two, this mob's strength is doubled. Intelligent mobs lose the ability to speak and reason. They will attack anything that is not also suffering from the same condition.

  The Razor Fox is a natural born ninja. It can pluck shurikens from its fur and hurl them like blades. Unfortunately, it grew up on american ninja movies, so every motion it makes is replete with unnecessary flips.

  I hit a potion, but braking had nearly wiped out my momentum bonus, so potion cooldown would be almost two minutes. Desperately leaping aside as more blades came my way, struggling to push off of beasts rushing me in melee—their backs were covered in razor-sharp blades—and generally trying to flee.

  I did get clear, but they were pursuing, and I knew I couldn't run long. The previous six stations all had mobs suffering stage-1 DTs. This was what I kept telling everyone I met, that they had to treat the challenges here as must-succeed, not risks to be avoided. This was the last mile of the marathon, and I wasn't stopping.

  "Just the next ten steps, then that first date with Lacie," I said aloud, then turned and headed back. In the passage, I relied on my checking to splatter a few. Then I was into the main chamber, and all that mattered was motion.

  I kept the Extremely Sharp Knife flying out, even when I couldn't manage a good throw, while my focus was always on where to position myself. There were a hundred, and they could all throw, but they couldn't throw through each other. The mass as a whole worked as inconsistent, mobile cover.

  Perhaps most importantly, they couldn't cure a rupture, so all I needed was time. I used a cluster as a shield, throwing my knife repeatedly as I backed away as slowly as I could, dodging their swipes and the few shurikens that slipped through.

  They inevitably cornered me, and it was high-risk again. One jump to the wall, kick off of that, kick off of open air so I could adjust out of the way of the main barrage, and I landed behind another cluster.

  It was always close, thin little cuts accumulating as I moved, but doable. I just had to delay those tense moments long enough that the 1-minute cooldown on double-jumping was gone.

  The constant motion, constant pressure to be perfect, built into a pounding force in my head, but I kept at it. About six minutes in, the first mobs dropped from ruptures. By ten minutes, it was rapid. At fourteen minutes, a half-dozen wailing razor foxes were all that remained.

  I killed them, then took a moment to loot the masses. Someone had explained that I could speed this process by just taking whole corpses with their contents, and I soon had 203 Razor Fox corpses in my inventory.

  It was going to be bad, these next 16 stations. There would be stage-2 mobs everywhere, and some of them would be dangerous beasts like these. Game day.

  I ate another crawler cracker, downed a bottle of water, got into a sprinter's crouch, and sped out of that station like a bat out of hell.

  Bad as the next few stations were, they were eminently doable. Stage-2s were common, but none were Razor Foxes, so I didn't have projectiles to worry about. I used a few more potions—I'd used more on this last leg of my run than in the rest of the dungeon combined—but I made it through.