9:01 PM, 9th of December
<1 hour and 19 minutes since unscheduled departure>
Before Wolf could make heads or tails of her evolving situation, Linlin knelt down beside her and set to undoing the steel cables that bound the Assassin to her chair. The work was slow going, not only because of the Goblins’ proficiency with the art of metalwork and confinement, but also because Linlin’s fingers were badly frostbitten.
“Lins,” Wolf managed to choke out in between waves of remorse she couldn’t quite place the source of, “what the hell happened to you?”
“Big fast train,” Linlin said without looking up from her task, “difficult to hold on with bare hands.”
“You were hiding outside the train this whole time?” Wolf paraphrased incredulously, for the first time noting Linlin’s frozen clothes and the specks of fresh snow on her wig. “But why—”
“How else to see job through? How else to wait for chance to fight back?”
Wolf was left speechless for a moment. Then the bitterness rushed back and spoke for her.
“You haven’t given up on the job? Even after we’ve been compromised? Even though Eddie’s on their side now? And… even though I’m as useless as I’ve ever—”
“Now not time for stupid questions,” Linlin said, then stood up to look down her nose at Wolf. “Get up. You can move now. And Gabs tell me give you this.”
Without waiting for a reply, Linlin dropped a lantern-sized object in Wolf’s lap. Another of Gabs’s contraptions: wide circular base, central metallic rod with an insulated portion that appeared to act as a handle, and a doughnut-like ring of tightly wound copper wires to top it off.
Wolf did stand up, gingerly, and winced at the pain in her stiff knees. She then turned the object over in her hands as she asked, “What is it?”
“Don’t really understand. Gabs call it… hm, [TESS… TESS’LAR CO—]”
“[NEW FANGLE]. Got it. And what do I do with it?”
“Shh. Now not time for questions. Not even smart ones.”
“Yeah?” Wolf eyed her Pugilist partner, with a bit of annoyance despite herself. “What is it time for then?”
“Time to dance.”
As annoyingly abstruse as Linlin was, Wolf’s [WILD SENSE] told her all she needed to know. Footsteps—multiple, heavy—converged on the two packmates’ position, no doubt belonging to Goblin soldiers drawn by the earlier commotion. They came from the direction Eddie had disappeared to, which meant the rear of the train should still be open for Wolf and Linlin to make their escape.
“Okay,” Wolf intoned, with a calmness borne by the familiar urgency of her situation. A calmness that helped, at least momentarily, to mask the despair that still threatened to pull her under. “Should we head out from the back? I’m not exactly dressed for the weather either, but I suppose it’s preferable to taking on a whole Goblin army.”
“No. We push through. To next carriage.”
“What, why? If we hurry, we could still—”
“Because it’s our only way to fight back. To finish job.”
As Linlin said this, she removed her wig and lowered herself into one of the Yuan stances, readying for the sparring session of a lifetime in all her (probably) sexagenarian glory. Watching this, Wolf sighed and resigned herself to her own fate. As much as her aging heart and arthritic knees would hate her for it, she wasn’t about to abandon her soon-to-be-grandmother packmate.
So, she shook out her shoulders and limbered up her legs. Then she reached for the scabbard on her belt to pull out—
“Oh, bloody hell, they’ve nicked my knife! What am I supposed to do without my knife?”
Linlin looked down her nose at Wolf in polite disappointment. “You Assassins all same. Need everything just perfect to do job. No knife? No Eddie? No plan? Improvise.”
Improvise? Without the one and only tool of Wolf’s trade? But the footsteps were no longer footsteps now, as the front door of the Reception Hall burst open, from which thundered a veritable platoon of Goblins, to a one with weapon and torch at the ready.
Now the dance hall played host to a soiree of an entirely different kind. Wolf’s [SENSES] flooded in an instant with guttural shouts and swinging flashes from the electric torches in the soldiers’ hands. She hastily shut them off, lest she be deafened and blinded into submission.
She was still panicking about procuring a new weapon when, suddenly, even her unaltered eyes felt the sting of a particularly dazzling glint. It’d shot off a curved blade in one of the Goblins’ hands, having reflected stray torchlight from its polished, almost mirror-like surface. Of course… the Glazier’s glassen scimitar! It wasn’t of a shape nor length that Wolf would’ve favoured, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
A Stoker chose this moment to lob a flaming flask, which then shattered at Wolf’s feet, along with a spectacular explosion that set aflame her erstwhile chair. Wolf herself was unscathed, however, as she jumped out of the way in the nick of time. The surging flames also cast the area in a new light, and in a crowded room like this, new light meant new shadows for an Assassin to vanish into.
[SHADOWBREAK]. Wolf used the one fleeting moment where shadows connected her to the nearest Glazier to make her approach. Before the Glazier could react, she grabbed his sword-hand and twisted it inward such that he cut into his own shoulder. The Goblin let out a grunt of pain and loosened his grip on the scimitar, which Wolf then promptly relieved of his possession.
She wasn’t done. It was a big shadow she’d dove into, and there was no reason to waste it. She twisted, mid-[BREAK], and found herself face-to-face with an Ironworker. The latter had already ripped apart his maroon uniform to reveal the full suit of armour underneath, topped off by a greathelm with two protrusions to house his Goblin ears: in other words, perfect defense.
But Wolf knew that even a full suit of armour needed joints to move. She used the last of her shadow to slip in behind the Ironworker, where she crouched low and put her new weapon to the test, against the strip of flesh just behind the knee. The scimitar proved sharp enough to elicit another guttural wail, as the burly Ironworker tumbled onto the dance floor.
Temporarily out of her shadow now, Wolf’s natural senses then attuned to a new series of sounds behind her. The click of metallic parts, followed by a hiss of air being pushed through a chamber. That, of course, would be a Boilersmith, readying his steam-rifle from somewhere amidst the crowd of soldiers.
Wolf reactivated her [WILD SENSE], this time honing it on the unseen Boilersmith with a singular focus. Now she could ‘see’ the point of his rifle as if she’d grown eyes on her back, and she proceeded to guide his aim, shifting her own position until she was aligned with a second Glazier who charged at her with scimitar raised. The air inside the steam-rifle’s chamber compressed again, and Wolf reacted to this with a feral reflex that was unique to her, even among Assassins, as she sidestepped just in the last possible moment.
The bullet—or more accurately the railway spike—shot out of the steam-rifle and whizzed past Wolf’s ribs, just a hair’s breadth away from making contact. It then landed squarely in the unsuspecting Glazier’s thigh, halting him in his tracks. And just like that, Wolf had already taken down three soldiers by herself—and all while using the Goblins’ own weapons against them!
But a platoon less three still left far too many enemies. Wolf spun again without stopping, intent on finding another convenient shadow from which to unleash her special brand of mayhem.
Or she tried to, anyway. For Wolf’s arthritic knees chose this moment to buckle, forcing her to check her spin and heighten her [SENSES] at the same time, the better to be alert to any and all immediate threat. As it turned out, there was plenty of such to worry about, chiefly in the form of a Stoker who’d set himself on fire, before charging at the reeling Assassin as a roiling ball of flames.
Her entire world turned a menacing bright red for a second, then a mighty gust of wind rose from nowhere and ‘extinguished’ the Stoker. Linlin’s [QI WAVE], saving Wolf’s bum again like it’d done on so many jobs past. The Stoker stumbled and fell, which then allowed the Assassin to put her unruly legs to use and kick him aside.
But how did the saying go? Out of the frying pan and into the fire? Almost as soon as the 'immolator’ had been dealt with, the other Goblins in the vicinity closed in on Wolf once again. This time, the soldiers had grown wise to her shadow-breaking ways. They held out their electric torches in a circle around the Assassin, thereby combining their individual light sources into a unified front that brooked no viable shadow. The remaining hands all glinted with a lethal weapon each: Ironworker’s baton, Glazier’s scimitar, Stoker’s flask, and Boilersmith’s rifle. Too many Goblins for one Wolf, and nowhere for her to hide.
“Now, Wolf!” Somewhere beyond the formation of light and death, Linlin raised her voice in an uncharacteristic show of emotion. “Improvise!”
Wolf didn’t need telling twice. With literally no other option left to her, she turned to the one ‘unknown’ at her disposal: Gabs Dominguez’s [NEW FANGLE]. She held the metallic rod by its insulated handle and raised it high into the air, with zero assurances that this was even how the thing was supposed to work.
The air brightened again—only with more violence and more chaos. The radiant energy contained within the Goblin’s torches burst out of their vessels, arcing all over the place like the Reception Hall had just unleashed its own self-contained lightning storm. Electricity surged and jumped from one torch to another, from the torches to [NEW FANGLE], from [NEW FANGLE] to the torches and back again.
Then the electric pandaemonium ceased just as abruptly as it’d visited a terrified Assassin and her even more unfortunate enemies. Wolf slowly raised herself from a cowering crouch, only to see that the Goblins in the room were trying to do the same, with all of them momentarily stunned, if they hadn’t been downright electrocuted.
“Let’s go!”
Linlin broke through the Goblin ranks and grabbed Wolf by the arm, dragging her along for a dead sprint to the front of the carriage. Wolf ignored her own aching knees and did her best to keep up.
The Wolfpack pair burst out of the Reception Hall and into the frigid winter air. Big fast train was going very fast indeed. The rushing wind and pelting snow nearly knocked Wolf off-balance, but Linlin tensed her sculpted muscles and held her companion firm. The two then stepped across onto the next carriage, whereupon Linlin turned around and crouched down, appearing to fiddle with the heavy steel coupling mechanism that connected the two carriages. After a mere few seconds of this, the Pugilist stood back and held out an arm to shield Wolf from—
Pop!
With a surprisingly modest explosion, the couplings broke apart, thus detaching the rearmost carriage. The rest of the Kronvall Express, with Wolf and Linlin on it, chuffed on, as a Reception Hall full of electricity-addled soldiers faded into the moonlit distance.
“Gabs,” Linlin explained, though Wolf already had an inkling. “Modified version of [HEX BOMB]. Compact but effective.”
Wolf nodded appreciatively, still staring at the singed and mangled end of the couplings on their side. She was starting to wonder if her Artificer friend mightn’t have been the real brains behind the Wolfpack's operations all along.
Then Assassin and Pugilist faced each other in earnest, finally allowed a moment to take stock of each other and admire their own handiwork. And what handiwork! Neutralizing an entire platoon of combat-specialized Goblins all by their twosome. Objectively speaking, it might even have been their most impressive feat ever. And it happened while both of them were retired and (probably) on the wrong side of sixty!
“Not bad, Sifu,” Wolf said with a genuine smirk, free from her earlier doom and gloom. “You haven’t lost a step.”
“You lose a little bit,” Linlin said, as polite and straight-faced as ever. “But not bad also. Maybe even good enough to see job through to bitter end.”