If you find a questionable existence or phenomenon in a world, you can usually explain it through three different methodologies: sheer human hubris, butterfly-induced chaos, or the law of supply and demand.

The existence of the Junction Freights combined all three into a disaster on imaginary rails.

Above a crumbling city shrouded in a broken night, a single red thread wove through overgrown concrete corridors. Hourglass quartz beacons flared white as the path passed their rooftop stations; talons attached to long, insectile appendages reached out from the beacon’s studded bases and waited for their guests to come.

The bullet freight arrived with multiple consecutive thunderclaps, smashing through a thin red wall suspended in the air. It was a sleek tube of aluminum derivatives and carefully reinforced runic modules, a hunting dog that never strayed from its red track as it tore through the night’s silence with a sound somewhere between fingernails on glass and a banshee’s wail.

It flew through the streets of the dead city, snaking erratically at harsh angles. The talons clawed at the freight as it went, giving it greater speeds, eventually leading to a collision with another red wall, where the entire ordeal — trains, arcane modules, cabins, and cannons — disappeared into nothingness.

“That one was bound for the west, where it’ll deposit approximately a thousand tonnes of perishable goods in cities located around Mankaria,” Tapio said through the team’s communication network. “As much as I’d like to ask for you to snag a few fresh peaches, the real deal’s coming in five. Look alive.”

When Jaxl originally explained what was going to happen, the job seemed simple. Our merry band of heroes would hop on a junction manarail, locate our desired contents, perform the swap, and evacuate before it was too late.

According to the maps and accommodating history lesson, Junction Freights was the Republican answer to the problem of raiders and monsters. That is, to put it into more concrete terms, an intuitive solution that follows the framework blasting your problem with magic and explosives until it runs away, stops moving, or has been dismantled to the cellular level.

These were machines of war retrofitted for civilian usage, which in this context, means they were painted with consumer friendly white and green and that was that. All the weapons and antipersonnel systems were fully operational, outfitted with enough munitions to reduce three dozen city blocks to rubble.

The tools we were given to undermine the solution were two exoskeletons with shoulder-mounted magnetic grappling hooks and Tapio’s walking cane.

The thing both Tapio and Jaxl both conveniently forgot to mention was that our target was travelling at the quaint speed of a hundred kilometres an hour, and if we didn't get out in time, we’d probably be atomized by the jump drives.

Standing on a rooftop overlooking the operational area, Owl and Sier shared a glance. Then they looked away from one another, hoping the other would take a tumble to a very early death.

I was strapped to Owl’s back since we reunited in Kon Atelier’s reception room, where I had the chance to meet the rest of the team. Sier was there, as well as two other fellows that I didn’t recognize: a scruffy-looking guy with short brown hair and a sleek black jacket, and a man with two mechanical arms and a hawk-like helm covering his face.

“Sorry,” I said to Owl when she picked me up, not sure what I was specifically sorry about.

“Whatever you’re going to say,” she muttered, “I don’t need to hear it. We have our roles, nothing more.”

“That’s the whole gang,” Jaxl said, punching a waiting Tapio on the shoulder. “Owl and Sier, this is Wiz and Elias. Wiz and Elias, Owl and Sier. Get along well, would you lot? And Tapio, give them the fancy debrief about why we’re here.”

The following debrief was as warm as a winter storm, and the team that Jaxl painstakingly gathered had the chemistry of an inert brick floating in a barrel of donkey piss.

Every person prepared in silence. When it came time to disembark, less than three sentences had been exchanged between the five of us participating tonight.

“Almost through the systems,” Wiz said, speaking up for the first time. “Tinkering now.” He was situated with Elias several rooftops away from our infiltration group, performing some manner of techno-sorcery that was beyond my current comprehension.

A thin translucent screen spilled out from a notch in the beacon and circled around him, overflowing with indecipherable script. He pulled at the corners of certain characters with one hand and carefully incised entire sections with the other, his translucent blue knife making quick work of the binding streams of light. “Since we’re trying to not be noticed, not much I can do other than slow down the damned things and run fakes on the cameras. Hawk-head’s sitting this one out, so it’s your seven-minute debut, ladies.”

Sier raised two fingers to her temple, glancing at the air we expected our objective to pop out from. “This is one hell of an interview process.”

“Wouldn’t expect anything less from the man who used to supply the Arks,” Wiz said. “Ain’t much compared to the jobs they used to pull.”

“That man never stepped into the field,” she scoffed. “Any competent fighter could knock him flat.”

“A few days ago, one did.” Owl commented.

“Now that sounds like a story.”

Tapio cleared his throat. “I’m right here, you know.”

“He lost his meridians, his left leg, received permanent organ damage, and failed to regain most of his eyesight.” Owl shrugged. “Beyond any Arts or modern medicine. He’ll be dead by year’s end, probably sooner. Now you know why you’re all here.”

A clear, clinical assessment. It killed the conversation in its tracks.

From what I saw over the past few days, Tapio did seem weaker than before. I did repair his body to the best of my ability, but I never thought to check in again — Jaxl seemed perfectly healthy after my patch job, so I didn’t think it was necessary. Was something different this time?

Owl participated in the same decisive fight as Tapio. She received similar, if not worse wounds from the blood-stained woman.

Was she doomed to the same fate?

Shimmering red light dared to break the pervasive silence. “Thirty seconds,” Tapio said.

Owl pulled the hood of a new mist cloak, concealing her face. Bands of grey swirled into existence around Sier’s left arm, forming a black flower on the back of her gloved hand.

“All mountains, no matter how high they reach, lie underneath the sky,” Elias said. “Good luck.”

Sier and Owl fired their grapples towards the fractured night, trails of black cord following like smoke. Red light broke from the east and rushed past, catching the grapple hooks and dragging us along.

The sheer inertia shift snapped their limbs and necks backwards; their secondary mechanical skeletons kept them from shearing off. I created a slipstream with us inside, attempting to minimize the amount of stress on the rotors. When we got close, Owl slammed Tapio’s cane into the train’s metal and created a new opening for us to pull ourselves into.

Sier hit the ground first, abandoning her exoskeleton the moment we were safe. A gesture conjured an illuminating ball of flame into her palm; she walked ahead of Owl, lighting the interior ahead.

“See anything?” Owl asked, drawing a pistol and knife.

“A monopoly on international trade,” Sier replied. “And fruit. Lots of fruit.”

“Not talking to you.”

“Nothing yet,” I said, scanning ahead. “We’re the only people here.”

Tapio placed me in charge of managing information in the field. He realized early that I was better than any radar or scanning system available on the market, so he tinkered with my interface until I could manage maps and environmental information with my Ether tendrils. It was the best use of my current talents — though I couldn’t see through most of the containers. They were shielded, perhaps by a material that completely absorbed Ether.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

And as I learned from Nina during our digital chats, magitek or ordinary technology that could display an area through walls and highlight every object of importance was prohibitively expensive, or was the size of a small apartment complex.

A minute of guided search brought us to paletes containing white cases stacked to the ceiling, the location our intel pointed us towards. Owl slung a dimensional bag packed with our tagged swords off her shoulder and worked at the multi-layered zipper while Sier hopped up and placed her left palm on each case, marking them with her insignia. A quarter way through, Sier did a double take.

“Wait,” she said. “These are too heavy.”

A snap of her fingers sent grey beads towards the locked latches. Owl finished unlocking her bag when Sier pried open the locks.

The case she hesitated on was filled to the brim with green pears. So was the one beside it.

“The intel is off,” Sier said, raising two fingers to her temple. “These cases are filled with things that are distinctly not swords.”

There was no response from the outside. Owl stiffened.

Sier turned back to us and sighed, dismissing the symbols she had placed. “So this was a test, after all. We’re expected to think under pressure and finish the mission, even under false intel. Isn’t that right, Owl?”

I was concealed alongside Owl’s expression through her mist, which allowed me to see her scowling expression. If this really was a test, she wasn’t in on it.

The clock was running — we were down to five minutes before the point of no return.

If anybody had to figure out a solution and fast, it had to be me. I was the only one with the bigger picture at hand; I looked around and scanned the area again, paying close attention to any discrepancies between the memorized schematics and what I was seeing.

“There’s a dark spot two cars over to the east,” I said, highlighting their maps. “We could look over there.”

Sier frowned. “I don’t know about you, but these white cases are standard transport. Are you sure?”

There was no way for me to search through every single case in this entire freight in a reasonable amount of time. Raw instinct was my only guiding force, justified with a haphazard dash of reasoning.

“The people we’re fighting take every precaution to keep themselves concealed,” I said, “If anywhere, they’d be keeping their secrets somewhere like that.”

Perhaps it was my monotone mechanical voice or the speed at which I came up with a new possibility, but both Sier and Owl accepted my guess and ran.

Because they were running, they didn’t have time to react to what was ahead.

The first axe flew past Owl’s head, barely deflected by a gust of harsh wind. The second, thrown with enough force to overcome my wind, bit into Sier’s left shoulder and bounced, carving out bone, blood, and muscle.

Sier immediately stumbled, crashing into a stack of crates. Owl slid and opened fire at the now open doorway, punching our target full of golf-ball sized holes.

Unfortunately, the wraith we faced wouldn’t be taken out so easily.

It staggered as the bullets broke through its body but stood fast in the doorway, already drawing two new icy axes from its hip. It gave a silent battle cry as it dropped into a guarded stance, empty eye sockets pulsating with a faint white hue.

Almost like it knew what we were after.

Four minutes left.

“Fine,” Owl said. “I don’t have time for this.”

She pulled an autoinjector from a holster and slammed the long needle into her neck. Concentrated orange bled into her veins, funneled directly towards her heart.

With every passing moment, her heart slowed. Her breathing grew weak. Sensing the opportunity, the creature aimed and hurled both axes at Owl’s chest. I could already tell that my wind wasn’t strong enough to deflect them — there wasn’t enough time to tell her to get out of the way.

“Lock.”

But then, with a single mental word, time lost its meaning.

Axes of ice froze, suspended mid-flight. The thrum of Owl’s heart, the rattling of the train, Sier’s pained grunts, the motion of the false stars, the spinning of this very world, the cosmic decay of life into entropy — all of them ceased to be.

And in that frozen world, a body lacking the breath of life moved.

Shambling steps took her to her target. A stab from a knife penetrated the creature’s core.

A jumping kick took it’s head off.

As she landed, time resumed.

The creature flew backwards, breaking apart. Ice axes skidded along the ground uselessly, having never connected with their target.

Owl collapsed, completely unresponsive.

Sier pulled herself from underneath the boxes, clutching her disabled left arm. A single glance told her enough to spur her into action; she took the dimension bag and my body, pushing onwards.

“We’ll grab her on the way out,” she said, pushing forward. “Mission first.”

Flowers of ice broke under her footsteps. The compartment was nearly frozen over; Sier’s breath formed into faint white mist as she searched for any white cases. The third stash we came across proved to be the site of our actual objective.

“Jackpot,” Sier said, looking down at a sword. Yet she didn’t make a move towards the dimensional bag, because there was something much more concerning staring back at us.

A case concealed entirely in ice. It sat gingerly on top of the pile of swords, stretching frozen fingers across the entire compartment. Already the ceiling was coated in a dome of green, nearly emerald ice and the ground was rapidly contorting to match.

In the shadows, more creatures were starting to form.

They were Husks, that much I could tell. They were quite similar to the Hoarfrost Riders spotted back in Granport and wielded similar weapons, but how were they on a moving train? This was the furthest one could possibly get from Granport — we were very nearly an entire country away, performing a job in a corporate-claimed shell of a city.

How was any of this happening?

“What should we do?” I asked. “This is… this is insane!”

“This is an opportunity,” Sier said. “In business, we call this gaining leverage.”

With one arm, Sier struggled to replace several cases. Then she lunged for the frozen case, pulled on it until it came loose, then legged it.

We were two minutes out when Sier passed by Owl, who was still on the ground. She looked at her useless arm and realized she couldn’t carry both.

“Let me take care of the case,” I said, prying Sier’s fingers open. Back when I didn’t have a proper body, I used to move myself around by creating a small cushion of air; a flat case was no different.

The last problem came when we reached our initial entry point, a minute and a half left on the clock. The hole made by Tapio’s cane was twenty feet up, and we had a single working arm between the three of us.

“Now would be a perfect time to wake up,” Sier said, slamming Owl into her exo. The impact wasn’t enough to rouse her — Owl’s knees buckled, leaving her slumped in the metal skeleton.

The freight’s floor began to tilt upwards. Sier grabbed Owl’s cannon and hooked the grapple itself to her exoskeleton, wrapped her legs around the frozen case, then desperately aimed at the black portal above us.

“Stars above and Hells below,” she prayed, “Give me a single fucking day where something doesn’t go catastrophically wrong.”

Her shot was off. The approaching of Husk pursuers stole away her attention at the last moment, causing the hook to veer slightly to the right. I focused and conjured winds to adjust the projectile’s trajectory, still focusing when the freight’s floor turned into the walls; burning the moment where the mechanical motor strained to carry the weight of two-and-a-half people, where blood wept from Sier’s shoulder and the rapid flutters of Owl’s eyes and the radio static melted into a crushing wave of red light and the tunnel that stretched through a black infinity on a single red string.

And we fell, a tangled ball of meat and metal, into the waiting night below.

The return party of Elias and Wiz greeted us on a nearby rooftop with varying types of silence.

The first silence was the radio silence. The communication devices had been hit with some sort of attack the moment we stepped in — some unanticipated technological field that fried any device connected to the Nexus network.

The second was the silence of failure; the slow, creeping realization that this was not a job well done, that the team has already irrevocably fucked up on its very first mission. Though a combination of my wind and Sier’s sorcery allowed us to land safely, Elias gave Sier a long look while he applied first aid.

“Blood is easily trackable,” he said. “This is not a good omen.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sier said. “I fucked up. Sue me.” She winced. “Ow.”

She explained what happened to the rest of the present crew and a very concerned Tapio, opting to leave out the part about Owl suddenly falling unconscious after miraculously destroying a Husk.

“There shouldn’t have been a Husk on that freight,” Tapio murmured. “That’s impossible. I know my own home federation’s technology well enough — our infiltration team would’ve been killed on entry if Wiz didn’t disable all the weapon’s systems.”

“I don’t need gratitude, but I take bribes,” Wiz said, giving us a lazy salute. He then gestured to the extra case with a nod. “If you’re ever confused, taking a moment to break down the situation always helps. Helps to already have the culprit on hand.”

Our gazes drifted to the frozen case, which was sitting a distance away from us.

“Now,” Wiz continued, “The only person who needs an explanation probably is Sier. You may be rich, but you’re still Class 9 when it comes to being a Relic Hunter — which comes as a bit of a surprise to me, but I digress. Do you know how Husks appear?”

“Of course I do,” Sier said. “Wait, hold on, what do you mean, a surprise?”

“They come from people, specific Relics, or are summoned by other Husks. I looked through all of the cameras and there wasn’t anything on board, meaning whatever you encountered was conjured into existence when you got on.” Wiz raised a finger. “Meaning, whatever’s in that case is very bad news.”

“No shit.” Sier grinned. “Why did you think I grabbed it?”

The third silence was mine alone, the sound of a keen observer. I had already seen many questionable things, especially Owl’s ability, but the case gave me a foreboding, chilling pause. It was the same sensation I felt back when we faced the Princess Husk and Cassandra — some withered part of my animal instinct was flaring red, telling me to fight or die.

Owl seemed to sense my nerves; she gave me a glance and walked to the case, pistol in hand. While the others were arguing about what we should do with it, she unclasped the latches and carefully pushed it open.

What was inside was enough to bring another silence, a varied silence of shock, awe, and near-complete bafflement.

Before us was a naked girl with a long, needle-like rapier of ice impaling her plaster-white chest. The case was filled with partially frozen blood; death had long claimed her eyes, covering her perpetually shocked expression with a layer of white cloud, her hair, perhaps once pure white, was permanently stained with a vivid crimson.

Two seconds later, she sat up, looked at us, and said, “This isn’t my stop.”