Howling wind fades to a shriek, then a squeak, then nothing at all as Ajax seals the wake of our entrance. We drop into the last car ready for battle and find it darkened and filled with luggage, not the hostile reception we were expecting. Dim lights blink pale tones of blue and green across diagnostic panels and holographic terminals on the walls. No warnings of our metallurgical entry flash for attention. But my instincts don’t trust the silence.
Neither does Ajax. He pads ahead restlessly between the crates like an out-of-place housecat while we work our way towards the front of the car. A newly-formed heirloom katana fills his right hand, stunning edge deactivated for the moment. He catches my attention with a small nod when we come to a stop in front of the small door barring us from the rest of the train.
“It’s quiet,” he whispers, running his eyes over the upper doorframe. “Too quiet.”
“You feel it too.”
“Mhm.”
“Feel what?” Mori asks, one hand on the hilt of her revolver. “You two getting telepathic on me?”
Ajax holds a hand out to her, palm open. “We’re being watched. Give me your gun.” When he sees how slow she is to reach for it, he lowers his head in deference. “I understand its importance. I’ll be careful with it.”
She draws out the battered black-white revolver, takes one long look at it, and reluctantly hands it over. I keep an eye on the ticking clock my JOY is running in the corner of my vision while Ajax runs his hands over the weapon with his eyes closed. Stores of metal from his belt pockets flow up and into the revolving cylinder that houses the revolver’s ammunition, disappearing within. His shoulders slump for a moment. His braid stirs when he shakes his head and returns to the land of the living, then spins the gun back to Mori with an outlaw’s dexterity.
“I’ve got a grip on its shape now,” he says. “Modified the firing mechanism to be fully automatic, and I should be able to create ammunition directly in the chamber as long as you stay within thirty feet.”
“Full auto? No shit.”
“Just… don’t waste shots you don’t need to take.”
Letting out a low whistle, Mori spins the gun across her palm and slams it back into its sheath with a reassuring thump. “Aye aye, captain.”
I shoot him an expectant look. “Nothing for me?” Wave a hand when he glares back with zero humor at all. “Kidding, kidding.”
“Good.” Nodding for me to step up to the door, Ajax rests a palm against its centermost point and lets out a long, controlled breath. I can almost see the threads of his elemental sense pushing into the train, scouting out everything they can of what lies ahead. Familiarizing his mind with the metallurgy that surrounds us. Every isotope is an old friend to his mind. He’s a master of more than just the classes he wields- has to be, in order to fight them. The better he knows the metals he manipulates, the easier it is to bend their physics to suit his whims.
“Two bodies on the other side,” he says. Economic words paint a pragmatic picture in my head. “Both male. Two meters from the door, equidistant on left and right. Early thirties, both over six feet. Left is one-ninety. Right is two-sixty and six foot… four. Brawling type. Left has bandoliers and knives. Assassin, possibly poison specced.”
Mori gapes openly. “How the fuck is he doing that?”
I lift my heel in silent answer. She shakes her head, disbelieving. Motioning for her to step back, I move up beside Ajax, priming ki in both fists. One levels at the door and concentrates a fusion bomb of energy within its grasp.
“You want to do the honors, or should I?”
“They already know we’re here. No better way to kick an avalanche off than with a bang.” Ajax waves a nonchalant hand and tenses his knees, already knowing what comes next. “I’ve always wondered what this looks like from the other side.”
I grin and take the point of the triangle, rolling my neck from side to side. “Spoiler alert: it gets messy.”
Less experienced fighters have long, complicated sequences of yelling and theatrics to accompany their mental process for drawing a higher flow of ki from their heart. My aura has been simmering like a half-fed furnace for half a minute now. Keeping the current in check this long has been like waiting for a starting shot. Ki leaks through pores. Stings my skin with purifying current, pulsing in anticipation of what two decades of combat training have taught it comes next.
One sweep of my hand hits the world with an x-ray blast of life energy so accelerated by the sudden release that it burns an image of the world through my closed eyelids. The kinetic payload punches straight through the train like a knife through cake. The aftermath is a molten hole larger than I am that drips globules of superheated metal across scorched titanium decking. And standing on either side of it, adorned in utilitarian combat rigging colored by Vex Shimano’s personal shade of silver, two bodyguards with backs to us gape at the flash-fried ozone trail between them like it just told them the secret to eternal youth.
Ajax’s lips part in surprise. “Ah. I guess they didn’t know.”
Overhead panels flash blood red, painting the interior of the next car in my color. Melted hydraulics hiss in an attempt to lock a door that no longer exists. Klaxons whoop. Both Shimano guards try to recover by pivoting away in opposite directions. A full second too late. The moment they were surprised was the moment they lost. Liquified floor plates hit them like ocean breakers and instantly solidify, trapping the men like titanium statues frozen in a metal tide. Ajax wastes no effort.
I’m past them in an instant, hurdling the shorter man with an olympic vault. Out flows the energy I’ve been straining to hold back. My sprint builds to superhuman speed. Adrenaline surges through my heart. My focus narrows, eliminating the distracting alarms and bringing my instincts to the fore. The rest of the car is filled with racks of empty glassware and more secured crates I flash past without stopping. The path to the next door lies through a rapidly shuttering blast seal that would take half a minute to melt through. I execute an acrobatic flip right between the shutters’ closing teeth and smash into the bulkhead beyond it at meteoric velocity, cutting that time to five frames.
Ki explodes from my shoulder into the door’s atomic structure in chain reaction, blowing it clean off its hinges. Metal zings like a register tone as it flies free. And the world erupts.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Barely-controlled pandemonium uncoils in front of me as the steel bulkhead blitzes through a crowd of five guards, shattering them in a dandelion explosion. We caught twenty of Shimano’s men in the chaotic middle of readying an unfinished defense to our breach. A unified team of eight martial artists are grouped at the end of the car, protecting an Innovator desperately trying to hack back into the door’s control mechanism and undo the lock. Between them and me is a sea of rapidly-processing hostility. My mind catalogs the threats in a beat, instinctively ordering them according to threat and distance and matchups and a hundred other factors. And I immediately shift my strategy when a towering giant of a brawler swings out from hiding right on the other side of the door with a pugilistic right hook already rocketing at my skull.
I catch the incoming fist without looking. Deflect the force with an open palm so it flies past my head and towards the floor instead. The man’s momentum carries him right across my path, where a waiting foot trips every kilo of his three hundred weight and drops him square into an all-out power punch.
A thunderclap of ki bends his unconscious body like cursive font and flings him down the middle of the car in cannonball carnage, flattening another squad. Taking a running start, I burst forward with a quick expulsion of ki and land on the man’s stomach, surfing him straight through the bedlam. Another blast of energy shatters the entire car’s composure as they begin realizing they’re locked in with two faces they recognize from the news streams.
Shots and weapons prime beneath the wailing alarms, belatedly reacting to my entrance. Feet shift towards my building storm, but I’m already inside their lines. Then the attacks come. Arcana release with panicked incantations. Fireballs and razorblade streams of elemental power ripple through the air. Bullets zing millimeters away from my skin, punching deadly holes through my aura.
I devour the attention and draw it in with an open hand. The moment every eye is on me, Ajax slips into battle with Mori at his side, hitting them with the second wave of destruction. His handiwork is the unconscious silence that ends what panicked shouts I leave unfinished. Decking shudders beneath as he uses the train against its own defenders. Freezing them in metal sarcophagi, bending blades to attack their own wielders, blocking real gunfire with foot-thick sheets of steel, and blinding them to the acrobatic gunslinger who rockets over the newly-formed barricades with gymnastic flair. All the bullets that fly his way just melt to add to his arsenal. He barely wields his blade at all. Mori’s revolver and thunder dispatch those he doesn’t, slamming out back-to-back gunshots charged with stunning payloads into a dozen hearts in half as many seconds.
Still surfing towards the next car, I fling a handful of ki straight at the next bulkhead, blowing a path through the remaining opposition. One of the Shimano metal elementals takes a page from Ajax’s book and throws up a barrier to block the blast. It only slows my attack for a millisecond, but that’s all it needs to. The eight martial artists arrayed around the door get the moment they need to brace for impact the instant before I hit them.
I flip off my human surfboard in a blur of wild red. One enforcer eats a flying knee to the face as I slam into the door with feet planted flat against it, defying gravity through sheer momentum. The Innovator trying to hack the door open gapes up at me, still trying to process the pace of my instantaneous assault.
I drop her a famous smirk the whole Section knows. “Need a hand?”
She doesn’t get a word out before the seven remaining martial artists dive on me at once, grappling and grabbing and doing everything they can to pin me down. One with a yellow headband hooks his hands around my arm and tries to throw me against the door, only to be slapped aside when a perfectly aimed slug from a mid-flip Mori pops his shoulder joint like a meaty cork. Another guard drives an elbow at my forehead. The bone shatters like porcelain when I snap my head to the left, letting him hit the bulkhead at full speed instead. His skull follows suit when my answering headbutt crashes into unprotected bone.
More hands grapple the other side of my body into submission. Twisting my arm free with a surge of strength, I blast another martial artist straight through a nearby viewport before he can reaffirm his grab. Storm and man scream in unison as reinforced glass implodes and the cabin pressure shoots straight to hell, sucking cargo and weapons and bodies toward the hole. The man’s leg evaporates into a strawberry milkshake when he hits a girder at two hundred miles an hour. The body attached to it disappears into the industrial sector. His JOY should keep him alive, barely. Hopefully. Before I can clear the others attached to me, a hailstorm of stunning bullets saws through the shattered viewport from the outside, cutting through them with a scalpel’s precision.
Their bodies drip off of me as I rise to see Jolie and our two bikes outside the hole I just made. Somehow, she’s managing to keep pace on the service highway. A hastily-created Innovator turret rides rodeo on the back of her saddle. Six barrels smoke and spin down from their outburst. I shake my head.
Flashing me a thumbs-up salute through the crumbling bulkhead, Jolie lowers her head against the rain and musters even more energy from the autobikes, pushing towards the next car of the train. I turn to address whatever guards are still standing and find only two friends in their place. Smoking bulletholes decorate Mori’s cape with red-hot circles. A near miss from a blade left Ajax bleeding from his forehead. Crimson trickles from his eyebrow to his jaw, then smears where he wiped it away.
He tips his blade at the trail of destruction I blazed. Between the slatting rain, klaxons, and depressurized air, I can’t hear any of the groans or curses coming from the guards we downed.
“Good work,” Ajax pants. “The vanguard fits your style well.”
“Gotta prove my reputation somehow.” My pulse pounds hard and loud in my ears as I flip open my JOY and check our timetable. “Six minutes,” I say, cycling the projection closed. My eyes snap to the door nearby. Superheated footprints still sizzle against the metal. “How many compartments did you sense?”
“Twenty. Heavy resistance in the next two, light after, an open platform car at the eighth, and then heavy resistance at the cockpit.”
“And six minutes to work through them all.” Chewing on the inside of her cheek, Mori reaches up and taps at the comm in her ear to hail Jolie. “Jojo, we got any idea which car they’re keeping your pro fighter in?”
A supersonic shudder reverberates through the deck. Heavy machinery deeper in the core of the maglev begin spinning through their electric ignition. Hoverengines thrum into activation with an attenuated bass rumble. The air shrieking through the shattered bulkhead suddenly doubles in volume. Outside, Jolie and the bikes slide perilously back into view. She risks a look over at us.
Even from fifty feet away, I know the wide-eyed surprise in my sister’s eyes.
Static crackles into our ears. “The train is accelerating… one seventy-fi… two hundred. Mars. Mars!” The bikes keep sliding further and further, falling out of sight. “Slow it… Slow it down!”
Redoubled rain slams into walls at lethal velocity. My stomach lurches as our inertia begins dragging towards the back of the maglev.
“Slow the train, or you’re never getting off!” Jolie shouts.
“Fuck this.” Mori pats me on the shoulder and dives out the hole in the wall before I can reach out to stop her, disappearing towards the roof with an acrobatic flip. Her voice interdicts the comm channel a moment later, drowned out by the raging storm. “I’m the outlaw, boys. Ice this fucken comet and buy me five minutes to find our fighter. There’s an open platform a couple cars up. I’ll meet you there and-”
An electric fizzle cuts her sentence off mid-thought.
“She’s still up there,” Ajax says, intuiting my concern. “I felt her earbud go flying.”
“Thanks.”
Stepping up to the next door, I level a hand at it, gathering a dangerous amount of life energy into the palm of my hand. Shifting wind and ravenous heat whip into a frenzied hurricane around my body. My heart flutters at the strain. I grimace. Ajax’s shoulder sidles against mine uncaring for the heat of my aura. The spine-nettling power that has aimed at him so many times gives him no fear now. No worry. He stands at home in its roaring eddies. Confident beside its fevered strength. And when his focused blade watches my back, I cannot help but feel the same. Like nothing can stand in my way.
We are not a perfect team yet. But we are learning, and through fate or luck or something else entirely, we are friends. We lean on each other and trust blindly. And that makes us stronger together than we could ever be on our own.
I direct a life’s worth of training into the bulkhead and send it to another dimension, opening the path forward with a pyroclastic thunderclap.