The Abyss
The vast pit under the Iron Tangle, flooded with Krakaren monsters and finally bombed by a runaway train.
Story so far
The Abyss had already swallowed Prince Maestro, who was teleported away rather than killed and who Carl believed then abandoned his sponsorship, producing less destruction in the pit than hoped. Carl's plan was to follow that up by sending The Nightmare Express through a portal and detonating it inside the pit, killing masses of Krakaren monsters and possibly the province boss while delivering the final shock to the already-overloaded ghoul system.
The strike worked. The explosion generated a flood of experience notifications, gave Carl partial credit for a great many abyss kills, and blew the ghoul generator — though Carl judged the province boss had survived. Elle McGib had suggested using Carl's nuke on the abyss instead; he declined, saving it for something specific.
Appearance
An enormous dark pit beneath the rail network, teeming with full-sized Krakaren monsters at its depths.
Role
Target of the train bomb and the pressure point that collapses the floor's ghoul system.
Relationships
Sources — 10 recorded facts, by chapter
- A mile-wide flaming pit ringed by thousands of portals — where the colored trains are dumped as garbage, revealing the floor's true machinery.
- Five or six hundred crawlers are stranded at the pit as the interior gangways collapse and the lizards keep respawning.
- Three groups of survivors sit stranded at three different heights of the pit, unable to reach each other.
- It rains crashed trains and monsters into the pit for hours, and anything that flies too near the middle is swallowed.
- The pit gives up its prisoners: 1,400 crawlers off the end of the line, and the gates turn out to be doors, not drops.
- On a map of the galaxy, the pit at the end of the line is the galactic centre.
- Carl points a portal at it and drops thousands of monsters down a hole, on purpose.
- The dumping ground gets a province boss, a platform-sized octopus, a mantaur carrying a war god — and Carl.
- The pit is where the god was always supposed to go, and it takes his second vessel with one second to spare.
- The vast pit under the Iron Tangle, flooded with Krakaren monsters and finally bombed by a runaway train.