Artificially stilted winds whistled through the high-speed rail transit station of one of the more remote regions of Regresis. No hair was blown about, no shirts were rustled, and a single set of ears heard the oncoming screech of a poorly maintained skyrail grinding against a very well maintained hanging car. The people inside milled about uselessly, guarding what only a few people would consider to be valuable. Mostly they gossipped about the rich woman who’d paid for their services.
Two bonded. One unbonded. All of combat age, and none as skilled as they needed to be. The cargo wasn’t precious, after all; just a simple mixture of seeds and bulbs for a garden that wasn’t even the greatest or largest in the province. The real prize would be coming in three hours–the gemstones for the woman’s bratty kids to bond their whipped spirits.
Of course, that was the original plan. One that had changed a hundred times over due to the woman’s incessant paranoia over the streak of skyrail robberies that had happened at this very station. So the cars wouldn’t be stopping. The cargo wouldn’t go through the necessary checks, which was very much the result of one bribe or another, and the manifests were so scrambled that it would be impossible to make sense of them.
Unless you’d been following the scrambling since the very beginning.
Noem tapped his interface once to confirm the charges were set. Three blinding green bubbles appeared in the corner of his vision, overlapping with the far-off station. His Steady skill kept his feet firmly planted against winds, and he scrolled through his inventory of tech to ensure he hadn’t forgotten anything.
“Magnetic burst charges, check. Migraine grenades, check. Disposable impact absorbers, check. Cameras…” Noem swiped through three separate views of the station, each at a slightly different angle to cover as much ground as possible. “Check, check, and check. Everything looks good.”
He swiped away his wrist-mounted holographic interface and nodded to himself. As long as he didn’t steal anything too valuable, people wouldn’t be too pissed. They’d add a few guards here and there and start sending out decoy cars like the one he was about to raid, but then they’d pat themselves on the back when they only lost ten thousand credits instead of the hundreds of thousands they were actually protecting.
The few messages he’d intercepted said they had to make the decoys ‘worth going after’. He’d almost laughed himself into a coma after that. But if they wanted to make his easy runs worth ten times as much, he wasn’t going to complain.
Distant scraping evolved into an approaching screech. Noem snapped to attention and cracked his knuckles as he activated the camera feeds in the bottom-right of his vision. Three tiny holograms popped into being–two of which showed the approaching car. He balled his hand into a fist and closed his thumb inside, then flicked it hard through the inside of his fingers.
As one the magnetic burst charges armed themselves. Large flashing lights shrunk down to the size of pinpricks, and the third camera showed all three of them placed just out of sight under the passthrough. If the car stopped, Noem wouldn’t make it there in time to take advantage of the chaos. But if it kept going, as he expected it would, the car would come to a screeching halt just a few feet from where he stood.
“Gambling on a noble’s greed is no chance at all.” He chuckled to himself as he watched the cameras closely. He’d only get one shot at this blindingly-quick heist and the easy payday it promised. She wouldn’t risk more transports for at least a month after this.
The car rumbled through the station with no sign of stopping. Noem slammed his thumb down onto his index finger, still pulled tight into a fist. The explosions made no sound; just a small pulse of visible disturbance that tore through the car with seemingly no effect. Metal ground on metal as the track’s magnetism outright failed.
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But something was wrong. Well, not wrong, but an inconvenience. The car had no windows to be smashed in, which meant the only entryways would be through the emergency exit on the top and the actual exits on the sides. The magnetic disruption would have hopefully knocked out at least one of them, so it wouldn’t be that much more work, but it introduced another way for things to go wrong.
Panicky people in an enclosed space would be prone to… mistakes. Deadly mistakes. Noem readied his Heavy Blow skill as the car ground ever closer, slowing by the second in a shower of sparks. He clenched and unclenched his fist as Qi built up in his arm, and when the car finally slowed to a stop just a few centimeters from where he’d planned, he let loose his skill with the destructive force of a battering ram.
Metal caved inwards. The door bent and groaned around the small protective layer of Qi that Heavy Blow summoned, and he activated Resilient to protect himself as he got his hands into the small opening he’d made. Metal sheared away under the constant drain of his Qi, and before the three inside had a chance to react, Noem summoned a grenade in a burst of digitized matter and lobbed it into the car.
Screams of surprise and agony ripped out of too many throats. Five separate voices called for help, or for order, or for the end of the horrible pain that split their skulls like burning knives. Noem hesitated for a split second in the presence of more guards than he’d expected, but from the lack of skills thrown his way, very few of them seemed to be bonded. Or powerful.
He steeled his resolve and leapt into the car. Flickering electronics showed a rainbow of errors and attempts to reconnect to some database or another as he quickly scanned his surroundings. More than a few bonded creatures joined their partners in holding their heads in pain. Or hiding their heads in pain, for those that didn’t have hands.
A Serpent made of vines. A dog-sized cat that looked like it was made out of rusty knives. Some sort of bound elemental that emanated water out of a head-sized stone that had been carved to look like a primitive teapot. And a mass of folded paper frogs that melded together into the shape of a much larger toad.
The last one wasn’t stunned. And neither was its bonder–a woman who looked no older than twenty with one arm held above her eyes and a grimace etched onto her face. Her bond croaked in a sound that was reminiscent of flipping through an entire ancient book, but before she could do anything, Noem lunged and slammed his fist into her stomach.
She squeaked and fell to her knees, eyes bulging with surprise and arms swiping down to clench around her stomach. Her bonded paper-toad croaked in defiance and spat out a wad of sticky paper. Noem caught it in one hand without looking and threw it to the side, his protective thin layer of Qi stopping whatever skill was woven into the paper from taking hold.
He flowed into a kick that scattered the toad into hopping pieces. A single three-dimensional paper diamond fluttered to the ground, yellowed and ancient, with some kind of written text that made Noem’s head swim just by looking at it. With great effort he tore his eyes away from the creature’s anchor and pushed the nearly incapacitated woman to the side. He’d come here for one reason, and one reason only.
Seeds and bulbs. All shoved into a single metal box with explicit instructions not to digitize it taped all around it in bright red warnings. Noem held his breath and wrapped his arms around the massive package, lifted with his knees, and turned in one fluid motion to face the entrance he’d made.
He shifted awkwardly to check the cameras just to make sure the second car hadn’t come far too soon. Clear skies were his answer. He pressed one impact-absorbing trinket to the box and the other to himself, took one last look at the car filled with miserable people, and threw the seeds out. A quick heel-turn left another grenade as a parting gift, and then he was falling.
Noem reveled in the bite of the winds that tried to rip the anonymity from him. He spread his arms and closed his eyes as the verdant landscape roared ever closer. The fusion of machine and nature was much more obvious this far away from the capitals, and it provided a perfect cover for a thief looking to keep to himself.
The ground slammed into him with a horrible crack, and the impact absorber shattered like thin glass. Noem grinned wildly and pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the shards of tech that were quickly snapped up by the moss below, and looked around for his spoils.
Spoils that crashed to the ground not a second later no more than a meter away from him. Noem wrapped his arms around the box and took one last look back up at the skyrail. His charges’ effects would only last three minutes at most, so when the bonders eventually recovered from their induced migraines, their car would be long past the point of no return. Besides, who’d ever bother to fight for garden supplies? Even thousands of credits worth of garden supplies were a single drop in the bucket for the rich woman Noem had been robbing for… years, now.
“That long, huh.” He mused as the railcar started to accelerate once again. Cementing another robbery well done. The metal box weighed heavily–but not as heavily as he’d expected–against his chest. “Three more months of living. Thanks for paying my bills with your paranoia, Ajiana.”