Jade
The train was divided into two sections, one for passengers and one for cargo, and the passenger cars were further subdivided into three classes: economy, standard, and first class. Fortunately, even the standard cabins were surprisingly spacious and comfortable, and there were even attendants selling food and drinks.
"It's really beautiful, isn't it?" I asked, watching the scenery shift rapidly outside the window; cutting through a thick mist, we descended the mountain range, where clouds crashed against the slopes like waves, and approached a lush green valley filled with rivers and crystal-clear waterfalls.
"It really is."
"It's always been my dream to build a little house in a secluded spot like this and live out the rest of my days in peace... Oh, but then I wouldn't have electricity or running water, would I? Never mind, then."
"You changed your mind pretty quickly for a lifelong dream."
"So what? They're called dreams in the first place because, when you open your eyes, you realize they don't make any sense."
"I don't think-"
"Wait, what is that?" I pointed at black shapes bursting from the tree line beside the train. "Horsemen?"
Men with bandanas and masks covering their faces were galloping alongside the train, brandishing revolvers, shotguns, swords, and whips.
"Bandits!" Legiano stood up, gripping his mace.
The next instant, a pair of bandits kicked open the door to our car.
"Hands up, everyone!" shouted the one with two revolvers.
"We're here for your money, not your lives, but twitch a muscle, and we'll take both!" added the one with the whip.
"Maaan, I've always wanted to say that!" the gunman remarked excitedly.
"Me too!" His accomplice agreed.
That idiocy... I'd already learned my lesson when I signed up with the adventurers' guild: they're players!
"What are we going to do?" I whispered to Legiano, gripping my huge open-end wrench tightly.
"We can't let innocents get hurt," he said, furrowing his brows. Moments later, we lurched as the train shuddered. "Damn it, they're stopping the train. Dozens of other bandits are probably closing in right now."
"Right, you handle that pair of outlaws over there; I'll head to the engineer's cabin and get this thing moving again," I said, opening the window.
"Wait, that's too dangerous!" Legiano said, grabbing me just as I had half my body out the window, hanging off the side of the car.
"Don't you have other things to worry about right now?" I said with a wink.
"Smart-ass punks!" One of the bandits appeared at our cabin door.
Legiano let go of me and kicked the bandit's hands upward just before he could fire, giving me the chance to scramble out onto the roof of the car.
"Sorry, bro, but unlike you, I couldn't take out 'Dumb' and 'Dumber' without some collateral," I muttered to myself, leaping from roof to roof, car to car, as the train rapidly lost speed.
"Bang, bang, bang!" Bullets whizzed past my ears; glancing back, I saw a pack of outlaw riders closing the distance as the train braked.
"Damn it!" I picked up the pace. "These bandits wouldn't happen to be loyal followers of the dead gods, would they?"
"Hahaha, who said you could go out for a stroll, missy?" A bandit climbed onto the roof of the car ahead of me, flashing a smile with teeth... far too white for a character who ought to be swallowing more tobacco than water.
A player, for sure. And a terrible roleplayer!
Player or not, I whipped out the scope that had cost me a fortune, dodged his sword swing, and: "pow!"
"Ow!" he groaned, stumbling back while clutching his nose. "A-Am I alive?"
"Ugh, of course they aren't the religious type," I muttered to myself. Then, I spun on my heel and kicked the bandit right out of the moving train car.
"I'm deaaaad-!" His scream grew fainter and fainter until it was cut short just as his body was sliced apart by the train wheels.
Ignoring the gunfire at my back, I hurried forward until I finally reached the locomotive, where a trio of bandits was holding the engineer hostage and cackling.
"End of the line, missy," sneered the bandit holding a machete to the engineer's throat. "I don't know your [Level], but even if you beat us, this train stops without the engineer, and you're done for. Now, hand over your weapons... nice and slow."
"P-Please, no matter what happens, this train has to reach the capital intact!"
Is that damn NPC more worried about his job than a damsel's safety?! Man, you need to get your priorities straight!
"...Fine." I drew two flintlocks.
"Gahaha! She's still using flintlocks!" laughed the bandit on the left.
"Check out the noob!" the bandit on the right mocked.
"True, they're terrible weapons that barely deal any damage. But you know what? They kick up a lot of smoke." In an instant, I fired right into the faces of both bandits, blinding them with the smoke, though it didn't kill them.
Ducking beneath their disoriented attacks, I fired my grappling hook at the wooden wall of the train car behind me, swung around the bandits, and tied them together.
Quick, think of a pun better than "end of the line"!
"End of... life," I said with a nervous smile, detaching the grappling line from my wrist and kicking the bandits out of the car, where they began to be dragged along by the train.
"That was a terrible pun, lady," the bandit holding a hostage said, using the train engineer as a shield.
"Hmph!" I kicked the NPC and consequently the player holding him into the locomotive's furnace and locked the hatch.
"AAAAARGHH!" the NPC screamed, clutching the hatch's red-hot iron bars as his entire body began to glow like a neon sign.
"Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch! This is so uncomfortable!" the player complained too, but met a no less grotesque end; his shimmering red censorship melted as if made of wax, leaving behind only his completely charred black carcass.
"Guihihi! Your objectives are fueled by the suffering of innocents and sinners alike... WONDERFUL!" my imp remarked, emerging from my bag. "But your enemies are getting dangerously close, Mistress," he warned, peering over the side of the rapidly slowing train.
"No problem!" I said, releasing the brakes, cranking up the engine pressure, and shoveling even more fuel into the furnace.
"Choo-choo!" The train whistled; sparks flew from the wheels as they suddenly spun too fast against the tracks, and with a lurch, we began to pick up speed.
"Anelise!" Legiano appeared, his clothes stained with gunpowder and his avatar bearing a few glowing cuts.
"Drink a healing potion and relax; we won" I said, leaning against the carriage window and watching the bandits on horseback fall behind.
"BOOM!!" An explosion about a kilometer ahead proved me wrong: a bridge spanning the river beyond the valley had been blown sky-high by even more bandits.
"Hmph! Those bastards didn't waste time just coming up with cool one-liners; they actually prepared for the worst-case scenario, too" I grumbled.
"Damn it... if we don't stop, we'll plunge into the river and all the passengers will die; but if we do stop, the bandits will do whatever they want to everyone here" Legiano said, his brows furrowed, teeth clenched, and breaking into a cold sweat.
That's not the kind of look I want to see on your face while you're playing with me, bro.
"Leave it to me!" I promised, glancing out the window again and spotting a track-switching mechanism just up ahead.
Snatching the revolver from one of the bandits, I fired at a lever beside the track, switching the train's direction at the last second.
"Hold on!" I shouted, pulling the brakes to keep the speeding train from derailing; the vehicle shuddered, and the metal shrieked piercingly. "Damn it, it's not enough, the momentum is going to derail us...!"
"Momentum... Keep braking!" Legiano said, disappearing back into the train cars once more.
We were dangerously close to the junction, but we hadn't lost enough speed to switch tracks safely, at least, not with so many cars attached.
"Damn... damn it!" I braced for impact, preemptively downing a regeneration potion.
Then... we switched tracks safely.
"What?" I noticed the locomotive and passenger cars had gone one way, while the freight cars had gone another, they had disconnected; the cargo tumbled into the river, but we were safe.
"Did we make it?" Legiano reappeared, breathless.
"We made it!" I shouted, throwing myself into his arms and laughing. "Hell yeah! Who do they think we are?!"
"...Guhehe." Legiano chuckled softly, his shoulders finally relaxing. "That's good. Everyone's safe now."
The thrill of the sudden action was fading as fast as the scenery rushing past us, trees giving way to low-lying brush and rolling hills, but I didn't let go of him.
"...We make a good team, don't we?" I said.
"...We sure do."
I smiled, and my heart filled with even more happiness than when we'd escaped the bandits. He didn't know who I really was, but he couldn't deny that we worked well together.
"Um, Anelise?"
"Let me stay like this, please. Just... Just a little longer."
Yes, yes, that's what a heroine, or at least an aspiring heroine, would say, right?
Anelise might have been a background character with absolutely no chance of winning the "harem war" destined to form around my brother's, literally, self-insert protagonist, but for her, that was enough: that brief moment, which meant so much more to her than it did to him.
There weren't many things she desired.
There weren't many things she missed.
But that touch, those words, I realized that was what I had been longing for.
"We're safe! Hurrah!" A man suddenly appeared, throwing his hands up in celebration.
"Eek!" I suddenly let go of my brother, feeling my cheeks burn.
Wait, cheeks burning? Why?!
"You two, sir and madam, are heroes. Heroes, I tell you!"
"Please, we did nothing more than our duty," Legiano said.
"No, no, no. With your skills, you could have escaped on your own, been selfish like so many other colonists. But you didn't! Instead, you risked your lives to save thousands of innocent people!"
"Thousands? You're exaggerating; there can't be much more than a hundred passengers on this train" Legiano retorted.
"Hohoho! The passengers, of course. But I was talking about the prosthetic hearts, lungs, and spines this train is carrying to the Imperial Hospital! The raiders' true motive for the attack was likely to steal those expensive, vital parts and resell them on the black market. I wasn't wrong: you saved thousands!"
"Y-You mean the train's cargo? The stuff in the rear cars?" Legiano asked.
"Hoho, exactly!"
Veeery slowly, my brother turned his pale face toward me.
We had just destroyed several entire cars full of medical supplies and condemned thousands of innocent NPCs to death.
[Congratulations! Your relationship level with Armadeiro has increased to: Fan!]
Game Over ☠
Peridot
We slipped off the train at nightfall and walked along a beach of white sand and palm trees.
"Wow, I didn't expect this floating island to have a beach!" Anelise laughed, running with her feet in the shallow water.
"I... I should turn myself in. Turn myself in and face execution for the grotesque mistake I made," I confessed with a sigh.
Suddenly, the girl took my hands, looking at me with a strange seriousness. Her brown eyes seemed almost a cold silver in the moonlight.
"Legiano. We didn't know things would end up that way; it's not your fault."
"Not knowing something is bad is no excuse!" I retorted, outraged. "Otherwise, no one but lawyers who'd memorized the penal code could ever be punished for a crime."
"What, is the law your moral compass? If you went back a few centuries, would you buy slaves?"
"Well, no..."
"Exactly!" She smiled so genuinely that I became acutely aware of the delicate touch of her hand, its warmth, its soft texture.
It feels like a scene out of fiction...
I shook my head, casting those useless thoughts aside.
"E-Even so! I don't need anyone telling me what I did was wrong; I know it was! I know my duties."
"Well, then do better next time, right?" She tilted her head, looking confused in the cutest way possible.
"Next time? I might get a next time, but not the thousands of people who died because of me!"
"...So you're going to give up on your mission? Does it mean so little to you that you'd basically kill yourself and abandon it, and everything else?"
"Ah."
That's true. After all, I'm playing that game to crush my sister's dreams!
"No. I can't give up."
"That's right, Legiano." Anelise squeezed my hand tighter and stepped closer, until her chest was just inches from mine. "No matter what, you can't give up! You have to keep moving forward; no matter what wrongs you commit or how many people hate you, you have a mission!"
She was smiling so brightly as she said it that the moon itself ought to have felt outshone.
I took a deep breath... and sighed.
"Well, it's just a game, after all. Alright, let's keep going."
"That's the spirit! Now, come on, the water feels so realistic and cool against your feet; you have to experience it!" She agreed, pulling me forward.