I didn't actually go through the door. I slipped through the open gap of one of the windows the drugs came from, barely fitting, even slim as my elven figure was.

  The room behind was dark, empty. I suppose with trains every fifteen minutes, they had a break in whatever they were doing. Creeping along to a doorway with light coming out, I closed my hitai-ate and tried to sense what was on the other side. Something small, maybe four feet tall, and furry. It was snapping orders at the others.

  "Not there, you dumb fuck!" Seemed like bad mangerial style.

  Dumb Fuck was a bit taller, lanky, with too-long arms. I didn't know what it was, but it grumbled under its breath, lifted up the tray it had just set down, walked a few more steps, and set it down again. Row upon row of stacked, gridded trays, like restaurants have for their glasses, except these were filled with the tiny bottles that were being handed out through the windows.

  Well, I had at least five minutes before another load arrived. I went back out the front window, activated Sink Into Shadow and started hurling breaking balls in complex three- and four-turn paths to sweep in at the few creatures I could still sense.

  A shout of surprise. Some screaming in pain. Angry words from the furry supervisor. A crash as a load of vials was dropped.

  That was four of the assistants. I started aiming at the supervisor. He screamed. He roared. As my third throw was incoming, his roar changed in tone, his dot grew on my mini-map, and the world froze.

  B-B-B-Boss Battle!

  It's Crawler Madison Pomegranate VERSUS Todd!

  Todd's a Pooka, and he thinks he's a "cool boss" because his crew always laughs at his jokes. You'd laugh too, if your boss sometimes turned into a giant goat and bit heads off. Nothing's quite so funny as watching a goat bite someone's head off, after all.

  The pause threw me off, as it usually did, but I was throwing again soon, straining the limits of my Breaking Ball skill to make it arc around different corners and come at the Pooka from different directions. I couldn't track his health like this, but I could easily sense him rushing back and forth.

  A deafening crash sounded as he kicked one of his underlings into a rack of drugs and started yelling for people to get out and find me. I dove through one of the windows just before they came out, not slowing my throws.

  The transparency benefit of the Extremely Sharp Knife was showing again, with nobody noticing where I was attacking from. Throwing it out the window in front of me down the way, and then looping back to hit from another direction, was just within the up-to-four-turns I could manage with my current skill level.

  I missed over half of those throws, but I suspected that meant the ones that did hit would count for skill-improvement in the dungeon. This went fairly well. The pooka-goat was doing something to close its ruptures, so it wasn't too badly hurt, but the others had all died before it kicked in the wall in front of me and I had to start moving.

  Unfortunately for the goat, I could skate faster than it could run, and the little tangle of hallways behind and in front of those windows gave me plenty of space to move. I was really wondering how others—every crawler I'd seen was stuck near regular human speeds—were managing these fights. Maybe they just could take and deliver hits on par with these bosses. No idea.

  All the same, he collapsed in a bleating, bleeding mess about the same time I heard a new train brake at the station. I looted his map—hundreds of red dots appeared, coming my way—and fled into the back.

  This dungeon AI thing, or maybe the fish-people is sounded like were involved in making this nonsense, were overplaying the drug addiction so hard, I assumed it would be bad when they found the racks of addictive potions they were supposed to receive all shattered and broken.

  While I moved through back there, I looted up every tray of instact drugs I saw. As all the crawlers seemed interested in what was happening at these stops, I assumed they would like to examine the drug at the root of it.

  As I looted, I kept rushing inwards, until I came out in a massive, domed chamber where a great, flexible machine of some sort was dispensing fluids from a hundred openings into massive, glass containers, which were being collected by masked figures that had been setting out the drug trays.

  Stretch Goblinstrong - Level 20

  An inventive mixture of torture and healing spells can distend a goblin into a far more imposing but somewhat less intelligent creature. You might assume this is a cruel thing done to them, but it's actually a rather current goblin fashion, a push-back among the youth against the preasure to always be a shortstack.

  The extra limb-length on these long-boys leaves a lot more room for muscle, but being strong-for-a-goblin is not the same thing as being strong.

  Looking up, I eventually realized that what my mind had read as a massive machine dispensing chemicals was in fact a massive creature dispensing chemicals. I realized this almost a whole second before the world froze and an announcer declared, B-B-B-Boss Battle.

  The staticky voice was putting some extra stank on it, so I would know this was a big deal even if the size of the thing hadn't given it away.

  You've trespassed in the lair of a borough boss! It's...

  The massive versus slammed across the middle of my screen, as always.

  Crawler Madison Pomegranate! My portrait was incredibly dumb looking because, when I realized it was a monster, some instinct had screamed danger and I'd closed my hitai-ate. My portrait looked like a metal beehive on narrow shoulders, which was the first time I realized how dumb the closed hitai-ate looked.

  Across from my image, the icon showed a toothed maw with tentacles reaching past the edges of the portrait-frame. KRAKAREN CLONE! VILE CREATOR OF DEVIOUS AND DEADLY CONCOCTIONS! TENTACLED MONSTROSITY THAT INTRUDES UPON THIS WORLD! THAT BITCH WHO WANTS TO SEE THE MANAGER! LEVEL 46!

  Had they just named it a Crack Karen? Like a Karen who deals crack in the slums? What was wrong with the people who made this place? Also, level 46? Maybe this was a bad idea.

  Krakaren Clone. Level 46 burough boss.

  Just one tentacle of the Krakaren whole, this Krakaren does its part in destroying all progress among thinking beings by dulling thought with the vile chemicals it distributes.

  It has become a simple beast, its only joy found when someone drinks its dark nectar and looses their ability to feel true joy. There is little more addictive than the nectar of a krakaren clone. Maybe it'll mix some up and you'll get a taste.

  At last, my hitai-ate opened again, and I could see the beast's bulbous body, suspended from the ceiling above. It was about 40 feet across, and its tentacles easily reached 60 feet in length, letting it lash across the whole of the hundred-foot-wide chamber.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  In fact, right that moment, the tentacles were lashing across the chamber at me. The attendants who were in the way got dragged along, pulled into mouths that lined the inside edge of the tentacles.

  Alright, this was dangerous. On the other hand, it wasn't exactly lightning fast. I rushed towards the nearest tentacle, planted a foot between two mouths, and leapt over both it and the tentacle behind it. Landing one foot against the wall and letting momentum, along with my skate ability, glide me further up, I wound up a fastball and sent the knife into the body of the beast.

  A tiny little tick of damage, but no rupture. I managed another throw while still sliding up on raw momentum, one more while sliding down the wall, and then had to start evading tentacles that were straining for me.

  On the one hand, this was dangerous. I knew it was dangerous, of course. It had to be dangerous. On the other hand, I could feel how useful it was.

  As the tentacles came, I transitioned from leaping to gliding across the surface of the tentacles, weaving my feet between the mouths and staying upright even as the tentacle twisted and turned beneath my feet, often pushing off to leap from one tentacle to another.

  It reminded me of the first time I did a serious uphill run and knew that, if I wanted to get serious about training, I had to do uphills as much as I could. The strain was different, the effect different. I could feel hill-sprints in my legs, as they were forced to take on a more serious task.

  I could practice tumble and light-on-your-feet on walls and ceilings all day without straining my current skill-level and do less for my skill than five seconds of keeping upright on writhing tentacles that were trying to kill me. Likewise, sending fastballs while doing side-flips between tentacles was pushing my limits. Aiming breaking balls so that they just skimmed the curve of an attacking tentacle without digging deep enough to stop was an even greater challenge.

  All that fell to the wayside when I had to dodge, again. The krakaren clone had twelve tentacles, all swinging with the speed and accuracy of a level 46 borough boss, all with the power to splatter me like a bug. If I had been thinking ahead, I expect I would have been terrified and would have found a way to flee.

  I was only thinking about the next ten steps. I slipped into proper focus, living the moment, focusing on how I would dodge the current tentacles, how I would evade the tentacles where I landed, and sometimes where I'd be aiming to go after that. I kept moving, kept cutting, kept causing harm. I made some progress, got a rupture going, watched the beast's health slowly tick downwards.

  The tentacles writhed, throwing me. It didn't like that rupture. As they flailed at me, swiping in broad swathes, grinding across each other to hem me in, I couldn't focus on cutting anymore.

  Still, that rupture ticked. Did something this powerful actually have no way to heal?

  That thought sitting in the back of my mind, I kept moving higher, leaping from tentacle to tentacle, until I was gliding across the broad dome of its body, its mouthy tentacles grinding across it like it had to scratch the worst possible itch.

  The downside of this high chamber, and of always running up the tentacles, was the same reason I was always moving upwards: I couldn't stick to the bottom of them, so it was difficult to go downhill. Still, I didn't feel very endangered. Building speed as I slid downward between two closing tentacles, I leapt clear at the last instant. I twisted past another swipe, hit the wall feet first, and braced my feet to skate down at a sharp angle.

  All the tentacles were distant, and I resumed flinging fastballs even before I was on the floor, adding two more stacks to that rupture. This was going to be easier than I thought.

  As I hit the ground, I heard a ruckus outside, something I hadn't picked up over the roaring of the beast and the slapping of its tentacles. Yes, of course. Another train had arrived, and I'd killed off the people serving drugs.

  I considered running, but I wasn't sure about the route outwards, through that drug-craving mass, so instead I just kept flinging my knife at the krakaren and dodging its tentacles.

  I was back on a tentacle when the forces outside were overwhelmed, and I discovered at least one of my miscalculations. First into the chamber were two enormous goats, coming from the directions I hadn't entered through.

  That made sense. The crowd leaving the train had split into many, many passages, and I hadn't found where they all ended. I'd destroyed one drug-counter out of three, but I'd prevented deliveries to all three when I engaged the krakaren.

  Hot on the tail of those goats were swarms of desperate junkies. The instant I saw a cornet, I removed the headband and stashed it, knowing what was coming. Yet instead of them attacking me, or really doing anything, the krakaren tentacles swept down and began devouring everything in sight.

  I took the pause, hanging off a hand-hold halfway up the cavern wall and flinging a barrage of fastballs into the krakaren's body. It was down below half when one of the tentacles rose up, aimed at its body, and sprayed a greenish mist across it. Half the ruptures vanished and its health shot up. Another spray and more vanished. Another and it was at full and one rupture remained. Almost all my work, reversed.

  From there, it only got worse. In addition to spraying itself with a healing mist, it sprayed a cloud my way. I was caught by surprise and immediately felt the searing burn of acid across my skin. I slammed a potion and leapt clear, the acid clinging and burning even after the potion stopped healing me.

  Rolling aside from slammed-down tentacles, leaping out of the way of an enraged double-donkey's kicking haunches, and getting going fast enough that I could skate twenty feet up the wall before leaping back onto a raised tentacle, I was still in the red and waiting for my potion-sickness cooldown to end.

  Fortunately, constitution sped that, and I was skating at some genuinely high speeds as I took a raised tentacle as a downhill spiral before diving through the gap between the goats. As I skidded up the far wall, I could finally take another potion and recover.

  The krakaren also sprayed two clouds of gas, but I knew what a tentacle looked like when it was about to spray, so I avoided both. Based on the effect it had on the mobs, one was a hallucinogen and the other was a choking hazard, both far less dangerous than the acid had been.

  With that much chaos, all I could do was flee, until at last the mobs were dead—including the goats, who I'd worked to give ruptures before they died since I thought it might give me boss credit. The krakaren was back to full health, and there was surely another train on the way.

  On the one hand, I was about twenty minutes in and had made no progress. On the other, this was exactly the sort of battle that had earned me 13 dodge skill before entering the third floor. So, I stayed with it, finding a rhythm of working on throws while the krakaren was alone, then focusing entirely on evasion once the next trainload swarmed in.

  I didn't keep count. Keeping count ruins focus. All that mattered was whether I felt better about my situation after a new trainload was wiped out.

  In time, I learned some things that, if I were equipped differently, would likely be useful. I learned that, if I held my breath, I could pass through anything but acid without harm. I learned that the healing spray healed me, too. Most importantly, I learned that it made a different spray based on what that tentacle ate. Gourmands gave healing, cornets hallucinogens, double-donkeys a choking gas, and antenopes acid.

  I wasn't in a position to murder a hundred or so gourmands before the krakaren devoured them and healed itself. Instead, I changed where I aimed.

  Instead of the fastball as the body, I sent careful breaking-balls at a single tentacle, right near the base. If I did it absolutely perfectly, I could trace a path around the tentacle, cutting a groove. I rarely did it perfectly, so there were cuts and gashes, all bleeding rapidly, all around the base of a specific tentacle.

  For the next few trains, I didn't succeed at what I was trying, but I got it eventually: between trains, and thus between chances at healing, I entirely cut one tentacle off.

  Now, I just had to do that eleven more times. No problem.

  Seven tentacles in, everything paused.

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  "The heck was that?" I muttered as movement resumed. Annoyances aside, I only had five more to go. It didn't take too long.

  With the last tentacle gone, I stood on the head and let it slowly bleed out, flinging my extremely sharp knife into the mass of monsters below, killing them all.

  Winner!

  The aggressive boss music faded, leaving me alone in a room piled with corpses.

  New Achievement! Welcome to the Rev-Up Family!

  Just one dose of Rev-Up Amazing Cure-All Vitamin Immunity Shot is enough to get you permanently addicted to this wonderful product. Congratulations on a lifetime of buying these healthful and invigorating products from your local krakaren distributor.

  Did you not notice? That's right, that healing spray had some side effects. Sure did top your health off, though.

  Reward: If you miss a dose, you'll die, probably killing everyone you know in the process!