There was a sharp BANG! as Phoenix fired, and while Will expected to be horrified he was frankly more perplexed by what he saw. Dio’s limp body appeared to dissolve into white light, leaving behind a blue, Dio-shaped apparition who drifted up, apparently asleep. Red veins pulsed along the blue flesh, throbbing unpleasantly and erratically and clumping around his heart. Was that the taint? And did that mean that was Dio’s soul?

The wasp-man’s body was also dissolving, leaving a similar blue apparition. He had similar lines of sickly red crisscrossing his body, but they were smaller and less dense than Dio’s.

Once again on pure instinct, Will struck forward with his whip, grabbing both of the souls. Both vanished, and Will felt their weight within his chest. He couldn’t communicate with either of them, but he could feel Dio’s relief and Cecil the wasp’s confusion.

“Hey!” said the snake-man, annoyed. “That was my underling’s soul! Give it back!”

He fired thrice more in quick succession, forcing Will, Virgil, and Rex to scatter. Glorious Purpose emerged in front of Virgil, unfurling his wings widely to act as a shield.

“The firearm spell has a limited number of shots before it must recharge,” said Glory. “Phoenix has just reloaded; after another six shots, we’ll have a chance.”

Phoenix fired once to each of Glory’s sides, which the angel blocked with two wings, then directly at Glory’s chest, which struck true, sending him tumbling backwards. Then, another shot at Virgil, who responded with a violet shield of energy shaped like a beetle, bouncing the shot back and through one of the octopus-man’s tentacles, who yelped. Then, a shot at Rex, who blocked it with a twist of the metal floor. Then, the sixth shot at Will, who leapt from his position with a portion of the wasp’s grace, bouncing to an upright position between the posse of train robbers and Virgil, roughly where Dio had been.

He felt his immediate connection to Cecil’s soul drain, maybe by half. Will didn’t know what else he could do with it, or with Dio’s, but he had the unshakable feeling he would know when the time came, and that if he didn’t use it, it would dissipate when the soul’s owner respawned. Will wished this whole soulmaster thing came with a more front-loaded instruction manual.

The bold motion had cowed Phoenix and the octopus back slightly, as the snake paused to reload. The mole stepped forward, massive claws bared. He apparently needed no other weapon, but the claws did glow with a faint orange light. They slashed at empty air as Will pirouetted back, slashing through the mole with his whip.

The mole’s mind was guarded tightly, like it was blocked by a lead wall. While it allowed the whip to pass through, nothing mental could be gleaned, not even his name. What Will could understand was raw, physical instincts; he knew the whip still hurt, thankfully, and he knew suddenly how strangely the mole perceived the world; he was nearly totally blind, and relied on scent and touch, with a little bit of hearing.

Academically Will had known this was true, at least of non-anthropomorphic moles, but the difference between knowing and understanding made all the difference.

“Glory!” Will shouted, as he danced in and out of the mole’s comparatively short melee range, “Take over with the mole.”

Faster than should be possible Glory slipped from the back of the train car to right beside Will, intercepting the mole’s claws with grace and ease. Since Glory made no vibrations on the floor and as far as Will could tell smelled of nothing at all, he was functionally imperceptible, as far as moles were concerned.

The octopus attempted to grapple Will as he juked, but each tentacle was highly sensitive to pain, as Will found out. The octopus’s mind was as impenetrable as the mole’s had been, but through physiological understanding Will knew that his tentacles had half a mind of their own, meaning quick, ribboning slices made approach difficult as each individual arm was easily cowed. The octopus, too, was confused and unnerved by something here.

On either side of the melee, Phoenix and Rex traded projectile blows, bursts of molten or twisted metal careening haphazardly. Once, Rex grabbed a molten shot from the air, bouncing it between his hands like a one-player game of hot potato, then threw it back with increased mass and speed.

“Hm,” said Glory in a manner that expressed feigned disinterest while inviting clarification.

“What?” said Will, who was beginning to lose ground as the octopus supplanted his grappling attempts with ever more arms.

“Their minds are shielded quite completely. A very powerful ward designed to block anything mental at all.”

“I noticed that too. What does it mean?” Will asked, as Glory wanted him to.

“At the moment, it means I cannot read their next move. More broadly, I don’t know. It may mean something, or maybe it doesn’t. It’s an unusual, extreme precaution, complete overkill against something like you or me.”

Phoenix roared impatiently and extended his palm forward. A blast of fire consumed almost all of the traincar, scorching friend and foe alike. The fire itself burned only mildly, and felt to Will like a slightly-too-hot shower, but it left everyone momentarily dazed. The snake leapt and lunged past everyone in the fight, intent on snatching the laurel seedling from Virgil.

Virgil came to in time for him to throw the vial to Rex, who threw it to Will, who caught it and immediately stashed it away.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Run!” said Glory, though Will didn’t need the hint. A flurry of flaming blasts trailed him as he ran through the busted back door of the traincar, then bounded through the next one. It had been blown partially open; an entryway for Phoenix and his gang.

Passengers looked at him with momentary, distant interest, as though the gaping hole in the train and ensuing battle were as unexpected as a vending cart. Perhaps this was true, for all Will knew. He didn’t have time to follow this train of logic, because just behind him the octopus gangster was chasing him.

There were a limited number of cars for Will to run down, he knew, so he scrambled for a solution. Hopefully, his friends could keep the other gang members distracted as he plotted. The octopus was surprisingly swift, unbothered by obstructions such as chairs or annoyed passengers.

Will ran out onto a flat, open-air car, lined with fencing and with wooden picnic tables bolted tightly to the floor. The train was presently traveling too fast to eat comfortably, but Will was struck with the sudden desire to have lunch here anyways. Perhaps another time, he decided.

The octopus burst forth, only just behind him, and Will decided this was when he’d make his move. With a meditative thought, the piece of Predation he shared with Virgil appeared, again in the form of a centipede. In an organic mimicry of his whip it skittered fluidly, nipping at the felonious mollusc’s heels.

While it twined around them, disrupting the octopus’s balance and keeping him moving, Will struck, using a portion of Dio’s strength to shove the octopus hard and sending him sliding back with the unpleasant, moist sound of damp flesh sliding against metal. The octopus wrapped an arm around part of the fence to steady himself, but the centipede headbutted him, sending him tumbling off the side, dangling desperately by a single, strained arm.

“Help! Help me, please!” the octopus said, genuinely terrified. The legs of the centipedes would certainly not grind someone to pulp in the same way a train’s wheels would, but it would still be a nasty fall followed by a serious trampling, stranding him in the middle of nowhere.

“Truce?” Will asked coolly. He was actually quite unwilling to leave this stranger, despite their ongoing battle, but the octopus didn’t need to know that.

“Yes, yes, please, just help me up!” the octopus begged further. Will could hear a commotion in the previous car, and decided he was done dragging this out. He extended a hand for the octopus to take, their combined power able to pull him up.

Just as he helped the octopus to his feet, or what approximated feet for an octopus, there was a snap from behind Will as his bag was snipped and stolen, then a boot to his back sent him tumbling. The octopus attempted to grab him, and did succeed, when his tentacle was blown clean off by a gout of fire from Phoenix, who was now holding Will’s bag.

“Sorry!” the octopus said, and to his credit he did sound genuinely surprised and apologetic. Phoenix only smiled as Will fell, rolling out of the way to avoid the steps of the suddenly all-too-large train centipede.

Will got to his feet as fast as he could, but the train was already passing him. He bolted as fast as he could after a tumble like that, but he was no match for the unceasing speed of the train.

“Will!” Glory said, and for a moment Will looked in every direction, unable to see where Glory’s voice had come from. But, of course, Glory spoke psychically, and didn’t need to speak from any direction. “Will, where are you? You fell off the train? Damn, okay, Phoenix pushed you?”

Glory said all of this without Will consciously thinking anything, of course. “I’m magically extending my range of telepathy,” the angel supplied helpfully. “You’ll need a way to catch up. Rex is apprehending the last of these scoundrels as we speak, but I don’t know how to get you here. No, I can’t pull you through any kind of hole, unless you’re suddenly as boneless as that octopus. If it matters, the train is moving at 30 kilometers per hour.”

That did matter, actually. Will resummoned the aspect of Predation, wracking his brain for any figures he could remember on animal speed. A cheetah, certainly, but that would hardly carry his weight. Something big enough to carry him produced hard limits. Something aquatic could swim through air, if the anomalocarid form was anything to go off of, but something he could reasonably hold on to meant most fish would be unsuitable.

Will decided what he needed. He sat, letting the centipede curl into a figure eight in front of him as he concentrated. He closed his eyes and imagined the first simple swimming things, lancelets, fish, but kept going. Amphibians, leaving the waters. Reptiles, colonizing the dry land. Then, returning, once again slipping under the waves, returning to the sea they had spent so much leaving behind.

When Will opened his eyes, the huge form of a leatherback sea turtle, shimmering in waves of gold, pink, and purple, looked up at him placidly. Despite appearances, it was a true hunter; no jellyfish was safe from its cavernous maw. It would do. It had to do.

Will gripped tightly onto the turtle’s shoulders, and it began swimming through the air, picking up speed. Its mind, something Will had never really thought deeply about, was a strange jumble of emotions and feelings and sensations of the past and future. It seemed to draw parallels between everything it did and echoes of the past; each hunt a recursive memory of each past hunt. Fascinating.

The turtle moved at a good clip, and Will caught up to the train in only a few minutes. It flipped over, depositing him back on the flat traincar he had been pushed off of, and vanished. It felt tired, and Will wished he knew how to tell it ‘good job.’

Just a car over Glory, Rex, and Virgil were waiting, each of the gangsters apparently knocked out and tied up, except for the octopus, who was shoved in a large glass bottle with air holes poked in it. When Virgil saw Will, he smiled, wiggling the returned vial up triumphantly.

“Dio will be returned to life probably late this evening once we have a secure place to rest,” Glory said, reading Will’s worry and assuaging it. “Good work improvising on your own, back there.”

“Thanks,” said Will, nudging the bottled octopus with a hoof. “What are we gonna do with these guys?”

“We’ll turn them in in Revelwood, which is the city that has built itself up around Daphnis,” Glory said. “After that, they’ll be the law’s problem.”

“Awesome. Great. Is that all?” Will asked tiredly.

“Well, for saving the train we get free dinner in the dining car,” said Virgil, sounding rather pleased with himself despite how much cowering he had previously done.

Will considered this. “Yeah, that makes enough sense that I won’t question it.”

Rex made a triumphant whistling noise and signed something including what Will now understood was his own name.

“Rex suggests that you’re beginning to learn,” said Glory unamusedly. “What exactly you’re beginning to learn I cannot possibly imagine.”

“I’ve decided I don’t care,” said Will after another moment of deliberation. “I just want something to eat.”