It was inevitable that in a world predicated entirely on fighting skill, combat became my religion. My sabbath is a light workout. Mass a sparring session. Yet for all the time I spend advancing my martial skill, barely any at all is spent fighting in groups.

My entire life has been defined by one opponent and one square at a time. The insanity of the Shimano train is my first real taste of a running battle that knows no end or beginning. It is chaos.

Every compartment throws Ajax and I into increasingly prepared mercenaries who share the common thread of a single shared mistake: they underestimate our ferocity. They are slower, less trained, less intuited to the reflexive flow of combat. And their huddled formations all break the same when sundered by a supersonic impact.

My fists are tired from beating through them. Bruised knuckles ache every time they curl into fists. Ki sings from my body at the release I give it, but summoning the energy I need to shatter formation after formation of foot soldiers hits my stamina in waves that make me stagger from strain when Ajax and I stop to breach new bulkheads. Sweat beads and evaporates instantly from my skin. My chest rises and falls like manic, heart racing as fast as the maglev to keep pace with the energy I burn to keep moving at a fighting velocity. I stop counting the close calls. Fresh blood darkens entire patches of my suit where burning aura cauterized it. None of the hits landed well enough to stop my tide. But they’re getting closer.

Eight cars into the maglev and two minutes after Jolie’s warning, Ajax and I stagger to a stop at the thrice-reinforced bulkhead separating us from the ninth. His shoulder slams into the metal as he slumps against it with lungs clawing for breath. Oil and red wet his blade from point to grip. More splatters from wrist to elbow. Protective layers of metal sheet his torso and legs in liquid form, hiding the extent of his injuries from me beneath a constantly-shifting barrier.

My hands won’t stop trembling as I take in a breath and force the engine in my heart to higher gear once more. They know the dance to come. It envelops me after one more breath.

Single frames of staccato destruction and molten metal. The flash of suppressed panic when all those eyes lock on. The concussive orchestra of ten different classes firing at once. The shock-thrill when I flash into their midst before they can react. Eyes widened by panic and filled with reflections of a crimson lance. Then I’m in my element. Defeat one opponent, realize they all fall the same. I dance between them and eviscerate. My tempo accelerates to a dynamic fluid flow that ricochets from cluster to cluster without stopping. Instincts in overdrive. I’ve spent my whole life training for this. Projectiles enter my aura millimeters away from my skin, trigger an unconscious response in my reflexes, and fly past striking nothing. I’ve already twisted away and etched another knockout into my knuckles by the time they exit the space my body vacated.

I do not stop. The storm becomes me. I cannot stop. To stop is to fall from the high that keeps me alive. I’m so deep into it that my mind realizes the fact with a startling amount of objectivity. I’m fighting better than I’ve ever fought before in my life. I’ve never felt like this. I don’t just see every attack coming. I answer them before they release.

Smoking wounds, blown-out walls, and shattered bodyguards collapse like reeds astride my path as I stagger to the next door; ten opponents lesser. What survivors I leave behind Ajax stuns into submission like a merciful vulture. The maglev shudders beneath me when he sabotages another power relay. We slow again, but not by much. Two minutes into the ringed track running a loop of the capital and we’re already drawing dangerously near to the final exit and our last chance at stopping the train. All the ground we’re gaining has allowed my sister to catch back up to the other cars, but when another rumble of growing wind shakes the deck, she slides further away once more. If she weren’t dodging thru traffic at two hundred miles an hour, she might stand a chance of drawing even with us. But our roads are narrowing in more ways than one.

Our operational clock diminishes my options further as another minute ticks down. Three more, and the only path left will be a truly unending offense that would end with Ajax and I dead before we ever reach Vex.

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My fingers spasm as I take aim at the door. White flames swirl and coagulate into a roiling, skin-melting nova within my palm. Tattered strips of griptape burn in the current. The flesh beneath is scorched black and raw red from gathering and releasing so much power in so little a time.

A chuckle shakes its way out of Ajax when sees my legs trembling just like his. “I didn’t know I could still be afraid of a fight.”

My teeth chatter as I grin back. “A few near misses will do that.”

“Come off it, showboat.” He laughs before doubling over and vomiting red onto the deck. Viscous color dries on his lips after he wipes away the remainder. “This whole train has been one giant near miss. Five damn minutes of near misses. My mind is screaming every time we blow another door.” The tip of his blade taps against the floor as an adrenaline tremble finally works its way down. “Yet I feel like I’ll shatter if I stop. We’re in an adrenaline runway.”

“Faster and faster.”

“Faster and faster,” Ajax echoes. His knees sink once more into the Lungracian stance. “Thank you, Mars. For carrying the weight I-”

I raise a hand, cutting him off. “I’m not carrying anything you can’t.”

A sudden quiet stills him after he chokes up more blood. His shell slips and again I see slivers of the spent prodigy who refuses to lay down his destiny no matter how thin the shoulders that support it have become. “How long… have you known?”

“Long enough.” I clap his shoulder before reasserting my aim on the door. “Don’t get nihilistic on me now. You’re not dead yet.”

The simple words lend new straightness to his shoulders. His blade still shakes, as do my hands. Neither of us can quell the impulse to push past our limits, even as our bodies pay the toll. Nor can we quell the single moment of hesitation when his hand flattens against the door. We simply beat down that fear before it devours us.

“Cargo platform next,” I gasp to him, savoring the final moments of rest. “Any targets?”

“Just crates.”

“Good.” I crack a handful of knuckles and wind my shoulder in a circle to loosen up the joint. “Here’s hoping Mori’s already on her way back. We could use some good news.”

What metal isn’t vaporized by my breach slithers into Ajax’s second skin while we sprint across the thin bridge connecting the ninth car to the tenth. The renewed fury of a subsonic thunderstorm pounds against me as we break out into the open, freezing my skin and shoving my momentum to a crawl. I fight my way across the bridge one step at a time and onto the wide square loading platform, complete with dormant crane. Rain scores the open deck like a pressure blaster. Waves of droplets fry into mist as they hit my superheated aura and burn off. Tall shipping containers block the view of the highway to our left. Their latches vibrate from the turmoil Ajax let loose within the maglev’s inner workings.

As we draw halfway across the platform, the familiar, subtended warble of a repulsorfield cuts into being, taking the storm’s burden from my shoulders. Silence and stillness replace it. Drenched to the bone, I brush a slop of crimson hair away from my face and reel back up to my full height. Something cracks in the shredded metal behind me. I’m about to whirl and face it when an iron grip on my right arm freezes me in place.

“Mars.”

Ajax’s gaze is narrowed and aimed straight ahead. I follow its line across the square to the next bulkhead separating us from another microcosm of terrifying violence. Inaudible hydraulics whisk that door into the train’s superstructure. Dim light and a single figure wait on the other side.

Even shrouded by the bulky silhouette of his mechanical class, Akis Prazen, the man, projects a staggering aura of barely-repressed violence. It drips from him like the rain that accumulates beneath his feet. Powerful and tensile. A palpable menace created not by him, but by the animal core of my mind. It instinctively recognizes the difference in capability between us. The simple threat his existence poses to mine. It’s an unsettling inversion of the effect the champion’s presence had on me when I first met him, and it’s none the less weaker for it.

Prazen’s robotic fingers clench in and out while the repulsorfield splits in a perfect oval around his entrance, then seals behind like a vacuum. Slowly, the golden sash hanging from his belt begins to sway. He stalks to the left. Favoring my half of the square. I’m only beginning to realize it was appointed for our battle long before we ever thought to attack this train.

Vex Shimano knew we were coming, and now he sends his champion to finish us off once and for all.