All Preparations Complete
Chugga-chugga, chugga-chugga.
“Keep your eyes on the track, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir! I'm watching closely to make sure not even a speck of dust has settled on the rails!”
The locomotive had undergone plenty of modifications over the years. Because the engine housing blocked the view, there was simply no way to see what lay ahead from the driver's cab. After one accident too many, the solution they finally settled on was installing railings — which meant the newest models now allowed crew members to step out onto the front of the engine itself.
So one man always took position at the bow to scan for obstacles on the track, and that duty usually fell to the rookies — to the youngest of the crew.
“Huh? What's that?”
Peering through his telescope, the rookie spotted a log lying across the line ahead.
“Log on the track ahead!”
“How big?”
“Judging by the width of the rails, it's a big one. We need to slow down!”
“Keep watching it!”
Screeeeech—
With a bone-chilling shriek of grinding metal, the passengers and cargo aboard the train began lurching forward. The driver was easing off gradually to avoid an accident — brake too hard and the train could derail outright, making this an extremely dangerous moment.
“Is this enough of a slowdown?”
“Yes, it should be fine. I'll keep watching anyway!”
“Stay sharp!”
There was no need to bring the train to a full stop just because of an obstacle. Slow down enough, nudge the thing aside with the shovel blade mounted on the front of the engine, and accelerate again — that was all it took.
Meanwhile, while the engine crew was scrambling about, tension began to ripple through the patrol squad riding in the passenger cars as well.
“Team One, move to the engine. Everyone else, secure the perimeter!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Weapons on your backs when you step out!”
Clank, clank.
Men in armor, armed with rifles, began fanning out toward the front and rear of the train. Out here on a plain with nothing but open grassland, if a train slowed down — let alone braked hard like this — it meant an incident was brewing.
“Everyone, please remain in your cars and stay calm. We will be responsible for your safety, so there's no need to worry.”
Even as he reassured the passengers, peering through the narrow gap in the window at their surroundings, the shoulders of the security company commander grew a little heavier.
“Commander, what about the signal flares?”
The protocol was that in an emergency, a signal rocket fired into the sky could be seen from two to four outposts, summoning immediate reinforcements.
“We hold for now. This is near Outpost Ten, isn't it?”
The commander decided to observe first. Raising the alarm over nothing would put his men through needless trouble — and in cases like this, it was almost always a small-scale raid that could be repelled on their own.
“Hmm... going by the schedule, Outpost Eight is actually closer.”
“Tch. So we're right in the middle, huh. Don't you worry, though.”
“It's not worry, sir — I'm just concerned someone might catch a blind arrow.”
The guards were, of course, utterly confident of victory.
Honestly, all the attackers had were axes — a few of them looted or scrounged from somewhere, enough to rush in swinging, but that alone would never be enough to deal with the garrison. Worse yet, the passenger cars — built of steel, finished in wood, and then clad again in a thin skin of steel over that — were fortresses in and of themselves.
“If they just stay hidden inside the train, nothing's going to happen to them, right?”
“Well, it's practically a siege, isn't it?”
Literally speaking, the natives were charging bare-bodied at a steel fortress out on this open plain — which made it almost identical in character to an actual siege. The crucial difference was that their axes couldn't open the gates of this particular castle.
Bang! Bang!
“Enemies!”
“Right side of car four!”
Sure enough, the raid came. The attackers had been hiding in the dense brush of the untilled wilderness, and now they came pouring out of it.
“All units, covering fire! Two of you keep watch on the opposite side!”
Bang! Bang! Ratatat!
With the train stretched out in a single line, providing covering fire was no difficult task.
“Aaagh!”
“Uuough!”
The raiders had hidden barely twenty paces away. At that range, even a smoothbore couldn't miss. The natives went down in heaps. They'd fought dozens of engagements like this already, but the attackers' behavior remained utterly incomprehensible — no one could figure out what they actually wanted.
To put it bluntly, these were people of the wetlands and the highlands — not of the plains at all.
Ka-ANG! Kang!
“Hey, you! Quit scratching up my train!”
Bang!
One of the natives who had closed the distance swung a steel axe — scrounged from who knew where — at the passenger car with all his might, but all he managed was a long scratch; he couldn't punch through. As he slumped lifelessly under a hail of bullets after swinging his axe a few times, a flicker of futility passed through the man's eyes.
Even through all of this, the train never stopped.
“Obstacle's been shoved clear!”
“Then we're speeding up!”
WhEEEEEEEEEn!
The locomotive let out a fearsome wail and began accelerating again. She was so heavy that she couldn't pick up speed in an instant — but even a little acceleration made her faster than any man could run.
Soon the raiders were shrinking in the distance. And the guards didn't relax their vigilance one bit, either. They still had one more job left to do.
“Check that none of those bastards are clinging to the train! Move in teams of four, and whatever you do, keep a firm grip on something at all times so you don't get dragged off!”
“Yes, sir!”
There was no telling whether some of them might be wedged between the cars or hiding up on the roof after stowing away — which meant they had to search the train from top to bottom. The only real danger was a raider determined to drag someone down with him, clinging on for dear life and pulling them off the train along with him.
Chugga-chugga.
Dozens of people had died, but the train soon steamed on toward its destination as if nothing had happened — and quietly, the scavengers of the plain began creeping toward the corpses. The grasslands were home to countless wild creatures, after all.
As Daehan's influence spread across the Eastern Continent, more and more resources were being discovered. Among them, the materials for hydraulic lime had lately become so heavily used that a rail line had been laid all the way to the source, and the materials were now hauled out in earnest to feed fortress construction.
The train was passing through a place built eight li north of Ara and, following standard naming convention, christened Abuk 8 Outpost.
Chugga-chugga, clatter, chugga-chugga, clatter.
“How many is that today already?”
“Was that the fourth?”
For safety's sake, Daehan's trains always ran with five passenger cars and five freight cars. They could haul ten of each at maximum, but during times like these — with raids this frequent — the consensus was that smaller trains running more often was the better call, so they were operating at the reduced configuration.
Five freight cars meant a full four thousand guan of cargo. Small, if you considered that a single Horned Whale could carry fifteen thousand — but given that trains made the trip several times a day, the sheer volume of freight moved was staggering.
“What are they building down there, hauling all that stuff around?”
“Whatever's needed, I guess. His Holiness Haneul is there himself — what's there to worry about?”
“I'm just curious, that's all!”
The hexagonal, star-shaped fortress was actually rather modest. There were six watchtowers, one at each projecting point, with two men standing watch per tower — and to exaggerate only slightly, they could hold a conversation with the neighboring outpost.
“Hey! What is that?”
“What?”
“Something's hanging off the train's roof!”
One of the men, scrutinizing the passing train a little too closely, noticed something odd about the roof — and then spotted the thing dangling from it.
“Looks like they got ambushed on the way here!”
“Careful with your shot. Think you can knock it down?”
“Better than just letting it ride by, and it's only the roof. I'll give it a try.”
With that, the man set down the rifle he'd been holding and pulled a different one from inside the outpost.
It was a rifle fitted with a telescopic lens sight — a weapon specially built for long-range shooting.
“Make it count!”
“Quiet!”
“Shh!”
Everyone around him watched with bated breath, worried the round might punch right through the train's roof. At this distance a miss would just ricochet away, surely — but you could never be too sure.
Bang!
The man held his concentration for a moment, held his breath, and gently squeezed the trigger — and a great cloud of white smoke billowed out.
“Did he hit it?”
“Yeah! Direct hit! It's falling!”
The shooter couldn't see through his own smoke, so a comrade from another part of the outpost confirmed it for him. Smokeless powder, it seemed, was still some ways off.
“Nice shooting!”
“My heart was in my throat the whole time — I was so scared I'd miss!”
“And that's exactly why you didn't get one of these rifles! Hahaha!”
Only men issued the scoped rifles could keep them — top marksmen who scored highly in the shooting exercises held at regular intervals. The bar was so high that out of the hundred men stationed at this outpost, just three qualified.
And so the trains running down to Ara were ambushed like this, two or three times out of every ten runs, five to ten trains a day. The raiders, whether out of some animal cunning or not, never came anywhere near the patrol fortresses.
“A train just came in — they said they got ambushed on the way here, too.”
“Nothing serious, though?”
“No, sir.”
If anything, the trains were the safe option. They were, after all, moving steel fortresses. Unless you brought cannons, they were nearly impossible to take — and the raiders' arsenal topped out at, at best, looted steel axes.
“They blocked the line with an obstacle again this time, I take it?”
“Yes, sir. Though — is even a small obstacle really that dangerous? Couldn't we just plow right through it?”
“Small ones are fine, but it's a precaution. A derailment is a catastrophe.”
Because there was no telling what piece of terrible luck might strike, regulations had been laid down forbidding anyone from ignoring even a small obstacle on the rails. A pebble or a twig might be nothing, but logs and boulders were genuinely lethal.
“The engineers keep complaining the rules are too strict, but I'll just tell them to follow the regulations.”
“Right. Safety regulations are the one thing that must never be bent.”
Even with the shovel blade on the front of the engine, if a piece of debris bounced off and broke something in the engine housing, that was a disaster. Getting ambushed while stopped was one problem — but hauling a wrecked train off the line and clearing the tracks was an absolute nightmare of its own.
“By the way, Haneul-nim... it feels like the raids have been getting more frequent lately.”
“Have the numbers gone up that much?”
“Roughly double compared to two months ago.”
Whew... What on earth has gotten into these people?
“Any unusual reports from the reconnaissance units?”
“Raids on ordinary civilians have spiked so badly that it's becoming a real crisis — worse than anything aimed at the military.”
If it were up to him, he'd have liked to lock everyone safely behind the walls and forbid them from going out at all — but everyone had their own work to do, so that was impossible.
“Tell them to stay within sight of a fortress for a while, then.”
“Even near the fortresses, the attacks come so suddenly that people are still getting snatched now and then, sir.”
And anyone dragged off was used as a human sacrifice... Agh. The stress!
“Still, marching in right now would be difficult for us.”
“Why? Haven't plenty of weapons come in?”
“We have to build the fortresses first. If we all leave our posts and the enemy attacks while we're gone, the civilians are in danger.”
“Ah!”
If the army marched out and the enemy raided in the meantime, there would truly be no help for it. The population was already stretched thin — the shelter fortresses had to be standing before anyone could deploy.
“What about the workers outside the walls?”
“Hmm... tell them to go out only when it's absolutely unavoidable, and otherwise to stay well clear of anything beyond the fortress.”
There were far too many civilians to escort each and every one of them personally. And it was still too early to put weapons in the hands of the locals.
“For people to keep going out even knowing this danger... they're remarkable, honestly...”
“Most of them don't seem to think much of it at all, sir.”
Right — they figure whoever's going to get taken is going to get taken anyway?
Then again... had something desperate come up on their end, to drive this?
“How about we step up reconnaissance in the area?”
“The raiders rarely show themselves wherever our forces go, sir. I'm not sure how much good it would do.”
“So they're just avoiding us...”
Sending small recon teams too deep was dangerous in its own right — out in the forest, the raiders were quicker and more dangerous than any of their men.
Looks like there's no way around it. Those fortresses have to be finished, and fast.