Inside the smoking, sideways-tilted bridge of the Blood-Cleaver, Captain Mad-Dog Kui hung upside down with his left boot caught in the ceiling chandelier and his face pressed against the cracked front glass.
Outside the windshield, a giant neon duck egg on Space-Billboard #4 was blinking right in front of his nose:
BZZT—EAT OLD GUO’S TEA EGGS—BZZT—GOOD FOR YOUR KIDNEYS!
“Get me down from here!” Mad-Dog Kui roared, slashing his boot free with a hand-blade of Nascent Soul Qi and dropping heavily onto the slanted iron deck.
He wiped a trickle of blood from his chin and glared around the wrecked bridge. Half his teeth were aching from the train’s ram-slap, the front cannon of his proud flagship looked like a peeled iron banana, and twenty-seven of his other black warships were wedged into a giant, groaning metal ball behind him.
As for the remaining twenty-two pirate ships that hadn’t been hit directly, their captains were so terrified by the sight of an ordinary passenger train bowling twenty-eight warships off the track that their hands were shaking on the steering wheels, afraid to even turn on their thrusters.
“Captain! What do we do?!” Second Mate One-Ear Wang crawled out from under a pile of star-charts, his remaining ear ringing like a temple bell. “That tin caterpillar didn’t even get a dent on its front bumper! It just kept chugging toward the green planet! Should we tow the ships loose and warp back to the Broken Star Belt before their main army…
