The Outlaw

What, really, can they do? Are they supposed to station wildly powerful mages on every train they run? Those types of folk don’t come cheap, no. 'Specially not when you're a washed-up royal-adjacent who's gotta' make the last vestiges of your fortune work for the rest of your life.

The train exits a calm meadow and disappears into the very treeline which you inhabit; as you hear it coming, you whip the reigns and your horse takes off! It deftly winds between the trees, just out of view in the night such that the guards on the train can’t quite see your shadow, nor hear the hoofbeats beneath the rumbling.

It’s mostly empty, as you expected. This one’s special, and you knew exactly where it would be headed and where it would be coming from days in advance. No passenger cars, just one vault car and one cargo car, inconspicuously worn and seemingly unguarded. But you know full well what’s in that vault car, and you know full well that there are guards hiding in the cargo car, just out of sight of the windows.

Your horse gallops as fast as it can, drawing you closer and closer to the train steadily… until you can raise yourself up, and leap off of it, snagging the roof of the cargo cart and steadily dragging yourself onto it.

You made plentiful noise, you’re sure. You keep your ear to the top of the car, crawling towards the back end as you hear someone beginning to stir, and a wave of suspicious mutterings. Drawing your twin guns, you prepare for him to step out onto the path between the cars to investigate…

And as he looks up at you, you throw yourself down onto him, pinning him to the floor with a sawn-off to his head after only a short struggle, with your other arm whipping back to point into the cabin behind. “No one move! If I see so much as a twitch, his head is coming off and so’s yours!”

There’s five other guards in that cart, earlier settled among the crates and now barely beginning to raise to their feet before they notice your revolver. They settle back; you pull the trembling man beneath you onto his feet, keeping those twin barrels pressed firmly to his bald skull.

“No one here has to die, if you all play nice. Got it?”

…

With the guards and the conductor off the train, the next step is getting it into the hands of the Goldblights. You climb atop the cargo cart again, revolver in one hand and binoculars in the other, looking at the stop ahead. The train is approaching its original destination, a wealthy little town in the mountains where the noblewoman and authoritarian lord Kariya Reimer II seeks to stash the fortune she’d managed to save from beneath the disaster of her family’s reign.

Surely it’s obvious, when the train fails to slow down, that something is wrong. They don’t notice quickly enough, though, to stop you. You raise your revolver, and take in a deep breath...

As the train speeds past you fire a single shot. It drops Kariya where she stands, among her guards.

Before anyone can even register what’d just happened, you and the train both are already long gone, fated to be intercepted somewhere deep in the woods by your Goldblight co-conspirators. What a day it’ll be, for the lot of you, and for the poor bastards who have to clean Kariya’s shattered skull off the train-stop.

THE OUTLAW