—Broadcast—
Perona read the Shadow Queen's expression and arrived at the conclusion before anyone spoke.
Another one.
Two apostles in the span of a few days. She wasn't a statistician, but that felt like a probability that shouldn't exist, and she was becoming deeply tired of things that shouldn't exist.
"Your Majesty." Moria's voice had the particular quality of a man trying to sound casual while his eyes tracked the retreating sea train like a predator watching prey. "Should we board it? A sea train full of dark creatures — there might be some surprises in it for us."
The shadow-eating beast inside him was doing most of the persuading. The shadows of the pirate crew they'd acquired had been adequate, but nothing close to what the tentacle monsters on the island had provided. Quantity without quality. Moria wanted something stronger, and his instincts were pulling him toward the fog-shrouded iron shape disappearing into the distance with the single-mindedness of a compass finding north.
Jade stretched her arms above her head, rolled her shoulders, and sighed.
"I've been idle for days. My bones need something to do." She looked at the fog where the train had vanished. "Let's go."
The speed of the sea train was far beyond what their requisitioned pirate vessel could match. Even with full sail and favorable wind, the gap would only widen. Chasing it by ship was not a realistic option.
Jade blew a short whistle — a strange, resonant sound that seemed to carry further than it should.
Her shadow spread.
From the deck's darkness, they rose: the Flying Shadow Night Bats, each one five meters of wingspan and cold-gleaming eyes, shaped like an enormous bat rendered in living shadow. They hissed softly as they materialized, wings already moving in long, powerful strokes that pressed the air down in visible gusts. Three of them landed beside the group in sequence, folding their wings just enough to kneel, exposing their backs.
"We each take one," Jade said. "Catch that iron dragon."
Perona looked at the shadow bat crouching in front of her. She looked at Beherit in her hand. She looked at the direction the sea train had gone.
"Could I possibly stay on the ship?" she tried.
Both Moria and Jade were already mounting.
She mounted the bat.
The three shadow bats launched into the night air with a sound like canvas tearing, their wings driving them upward in hard, fast strokes. The speed was immediate and absolute — the kind that doesn't build gradually but simply exists, one moment still and the next already somewhere else. The ocean blurred beneath them. The fog that had swallowed the sea train parted before them like it had somewhere better to be, and in almost no time at all, the shape of the iron dragon resolved out of the darkness ahead.
It was not in good condition.
The rear carriages were burning. Not a small fire — a sustained, spreading blaze that had already consumed two cars and was working its way forward with patience and appetite. The sea wind fanned it and the fog fed it, and from outside the scene had the specific grimness of something that has been wrong for long enough to become normal.
"A swordsman," Jade said, her tone carrying the particular quality of someone reading a situation through borrowed eyes. The Flying Shadow Night Bats shared their vision with her, and through that shared sight she could track a figure moving through the interior of the carriages — fast, purposeful, cutting through what stood between him and the survivors. "The fact that there's anyone left alive on that train is because of him."
Inside the sea train, the air smelled of blood and burning metal and something worse underneath both.
Carriage after carriage had already been lost — seats overturned, windows shattered, personal effects scattered across floors slick with things that didn't bear examining. The walls were dark with what the light didn't make cleaner. Whatever passengers had been in those cars were no longer passengers.
In the second-to-last intact carriage, a family of three had pressed themselves into the corner farthest from the door, arms around each other, voices gone quiet in the way that happens when despair runs out of language. They had been listening to the sounds from the next carriage for long enough to understand what those sounds meant.
The door to the roof buckled.
Spider legs — eight of them, segmented and ending in points that punched through the iron sheeting — appeared over the edge of the carriage ceiling and began moving forward with unhurried confidence. The thing that followed them into view combined the torso of something almost human with the lower body of a spider, bloated and pale, its mandibles still moving from the last carriage. It had eaten well tonight. It was still hungry.
It positioned itself above the family and opened its mouth.
"How dare you, evil creature!"
The voice came from behind — from the connecting door to the rear, which burst open a half-second before the speaker came through it.
"Breathing of Flame — Type One — Shiranui!"
The blade came wrapped in fire. Not decorated with fire, not supplemented by it — fire was the medium, the blade only its edge, and the thrust moved at the speed of a flame's ignition: too fast to track, present and done before the eye finished registering the beginning. The spider creature came apart at the midpoint. The flames that had ridden the cut caught in the remains and consumed them efficiently, leaving nothing behind that would need to be buried.
The family stared.
The swordsman stood between them and where the thing had been. His yellow hair had ends touched red, and it moved in the heat of his own technique like a flame that hadn't decided yet whether it was done. His brows were thick and set above eyes that scanned the carriage with the specific attention of someone who is angry about something and has decided to be useful about it.
He turned to the family with an expression that had no room for doubt.
"Don't be afraid. Follow me. I will get you out of here."
He said it like a statement of fact. Not a promise — a fact that simply hadn't finished happening yet.
Marine Captain — Rengoku Kyojuro.
The Justice cloak across his shoulders had seen better days. It had taken cuts and burns both, and it wore them without apology, the same way its owner did. The survivors who gathered behind him as he moved forward through the carriages — a dozen in one car, a handful in the next, two more pressed behind a toppled luggage rack — looked at the word on the back of that cloak, and looked at the man wearing it, and experienced something that didn't happen often enough when that word came up.
They believed it.
Rengoku moved through the train like he had already decided on the outcome and was simply enacting it. Carriage by carriage, clearing what needed clearing, pulling survivors from corners and from under seats and from the spaces between things, directing them forward with the efficiency of someone who had calculated the train's remaining safe time and was working against that number. He didn't slow down. He didn't hesitate at the sight of what the apostle's creatures had done in the carriages he passed through.
He simply moved forward, blade in hand, and the dark things in his path stopped being in his path.
Dozens of survivors formed a ragged column behind him, moving toward the front of the train, toward whatever safety the front might still hold — following a Marine captain through a mobile hell on the sea, and grateful for every step of it.
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