[color=76D0FF]”Buckshot, which cars should we avoid?”[/color] Marit wasn’t sure what she was scared of more: Striking too close to the nuke or too close to Dalton. Though she didn’t say anything on account of the hectic situation, she did wonder why, even if controls were locked out they didn’t just decouple the tractor. Though the carriages’ treads were driven, they relied on external control inputs and power supply and the brakes were designed to engage when decoupled to be fail safe, right? Or could these peasants have enough technical understanding to tamper with it? No matter. For now she’d focus her lasers on the tracks of the rear cars, guessing based on no evidence whatsoever that the nuke would be placed around the middle, like putting VIPs into vehicles in the middle of a convoy. Fortunately Archie had settled into the silt by now and nothing except the undulating land the train was crossing messed with her aiming, unbothered by heat, return fire or ammunition expenditure. Marit could only hope Steel Rain’s DIY smoke screen wouldn’t turn against them, but so far it seemed to be doing its job.

[center][color=76D0FF]
“From the southeast came the second attack; Threat of tomorrow unveiled
11:02 a.m. on the 9th of august; Over the valley, like ball lightning.

The bomb detonates and the land turns to waste; Barren for decades to come
The factories burning, the steelworks destroyed; Surrender your war else you'll perish in flames.

Second attack, B-29s turning back.”
[/color][/center]
By now the train was shedding shattered and half-melted pieces of armor and running gear, leaving a trail of debris and carved earth in its wake like some slug. Marit was reminded of Völuspá, at first read to her by her mother, edited to be more easily digestible by the mind of a five year old, and later the original text minus the six stanzas worth of Dwarf names. The poem speaks of the end of the world beginning with the sea flooding the world as the world serpent Jörmungandr that encircles Midgard releases its tail from its mouth and comes ashore. From a certain point of view, a rising tide could be thought of as a swelling sea and a nuke certainly qualified as a localized apocalypse, but fortunately the Heavenly Sword didn’t have enough money to bring an actual serpent and had to settle for a slightly overgrown earthworm. [color=76D0FF][i]’Maybe if you’d embraced the ways of us capitalist swine, you wouldn’t be poor and could actually afford the check your big mouth is writing.’[/i][/color] Marit giggled as the adrenaline rush from the encroaching doom hit. She just hoped the Knights could take more than nine steps after defeating this thing.