"The brake valve!"
Upon hearing his words, Evan was thankful for the distance between the cars and the fact that the intercom was not on, or the amount of panic caused by this short 'conversation' would have been unimaginable.
The Driver quickly ran back into his cab and quickly pulled down a red lever that had a similarly coloured large caution sign printed right beside it, but even after holding it down for more than 15 seconds, he saw that the train's speed was not reduced in the slightest.
He quickly let go of the emergency brake and grabbed the handheld radio in the cab before pressing a button and screaming into it.
"MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!!!"
Evan let the man handle the official procedures while he moved to check on the motionless engineer on the floor to be sure he still drew breath.
At the same time, he was wrecking his brain for a method that could be used to either slow down or completely stop the train that was currently going forward at full speed.
The noise coming from the upper deck where the fighting was still ongoing wasn't very helpful in letting him think.
"Tsk…if I don't beat the shit out of these fuckers when we stop this train…!"
He barely held himself back from cursing too much while using his paladin skill's limited healing on the engineers.
After this, he returned to the other passenger cars, meeting with Eliza, the Canis Church Paladin and a bunch of other adventurers halfway.
He outlined the circumstances to them, and in collaboration, they quickly formulated a solution, devising a strategy to halt the train's movement forcefully before it veered off track.
First, some of the adventurers present went up to the upper deck to put an end to the fighting there to make sure it didn't interfere with what they were doing.
Evan, Eliza, the Paladin and some others moved to the top of the train while another group moved towards the caboose locomotive.
"You sure this is gonna work?!"
"It's the best we can come up with in a short while. Those sparks coming from the engine car are increasing by the minute and that's not good!"
The core of this plan was one of the adventurers who had a skill that enabled her to create enhanced energy constructs, but at a huge energy cost.
Eliza was there to aid her with that by transferring all the life force she had sucked out of the hijackers she defeated into the woman in the form of magic power to help with that.
As for Evan and the Paladin, they were to create pillars with their ice and earth magic respectively which they had to tether to the train and then pin to the ground to help in slowing the train's movements.
This was also what the group at the last car was supposed to do, and with the help of a certain reluctant high demon who had off-the-charts physical strength.
"Begin!!"
"Light Magic!! Energicraft!!"
Magic and skill were activated simultaneously, flowing from the top of the train to the ground and even below the tracks, embedding a wedge of energy into the earth.
Two massive pillars of light formed on the tracks in front of the train, where it had yet to pass; their appearance looked plenty similar to the posts used to hold the nets in some court-based sports.
And just like in those sports, these two columns also supported a net, one that was formed by rapidly weaving and interconnecting energy strands closely together.
As the train zoomed across the tracks, it naturally entered the rapidly expanding net and was caught on it.
They let it go forward for about three seconds, enough time for the net to wrap around the train's sides.
Now then, while the train had run into the net and was still going forward, the pillars of light remained stationary and the net could do very little in the way of further expansion.
This coupled with the length of the net that was slowly reducing created a powerful effect that slowly dragged the train in the direction of the twin light column constructs.
Energy sparkled in the form of streaks of light as the pull slowed the train ever so slightly, but the effect was so minor it could barely be felt.
The adventurer's remaining magic power drained faster than it could chip away at the speeding train's energy.
This is where Eliza came in, transferring energy into the woman's body to help her maintain the energy constructs, increasing the size of the energy column constructs.
"Now!"
Evan and the Paladin took action, creating the pillars tethered to the sides of the train to further slow its movements, while Greed who was atop the last car heaved an annoyed sigh before jumping off the train.
He landed with his two feet on the ground, before turning around and summoning a partial avatar using his unique skill.
The giant arm-shaped construct of sin energy reached forward and grabbed the rear locomotive car, before beginning to slowly pull backwards.
He did his best to keep the force he was using to pull the train backwards in sync with the force action on it from the front to push it forward.
With the combination of the forces from the net in the front that was dragging the train towards the columns of light and the pull of Greed's partial avatar, the train began slowing rapidly as if it had used emergency brakes.
The recoil nearly flung the body of the woman creating the net in the opposite direction of the train's movement, but Eliza quickly conjured a barrier behind her to prevent her from falling backwards.
Beads of sweat dripped down her neck as she struggled not to lose focus and keep using her skill, making it powerful enough to cancel out the train's kinetic energy, but also delicate enough that it didn't send the train careening off the tracks.
And the farther they were from the area where the two light pillar constructs were set up, the harder it became to keep it going.
Clenching her jaw hard enough to crack a tooth, she forced herself to maintain control all the way to the limit and summoned more power from her skill.
Slower, slower, the wheels ground to a halt—and finally, the train stopped.
Plumes of smoke billowed from the locomotive car in the front, ascending into the sky to join the clouds that glided past the morning sun.
"This smoke…?! Milena!"
[On it!]
The water spirit had already moved before Evan had even noticed something was wrong, blitzing over to the side of the train and dousing the flaming wheels in water, before breaking through Evan's ice wall and doing the same to the smoking components in the engine room.
[All clear.]
Evan echoed the spirit's words, causing expressions of joy to form on the faces of all those who participated in the plan to stop the train's movements.
"If those wheels had caught fire while this thing was still at full speed, I dread to imagine what would have happened."
They all had to agree with the Paladin on his words as none of them wanted to know what happened when the wheels of a train speeding at 250 km/hr caught fire.
Just as Evan was about to join them in celebrating, three diaphanous notification boards suddenly appeared within his field of vision, and the messages they carried were enough to catapult his mood to rock bottom.
Now, he honestly wished he could see what happened when the wheels of a speeding train burst into flames than for this to happen.
[Two NEW messages from the goddess 'Artemisia']
[Bad news.]
[The 'Lair of the Lizard Lord' just had a Dungeon Break.]
Th𝗲 most uptodate novels are published on free(w)ebnov(e)l.𝒄𝒐𝙢