Plastic Men Raid

The Plastic Men Raid begins as an interception of Orient’s spirit-train across the desert, but its defining threat is not the raiders’ improvised vehicles: it is the Trashemoth lumbering behind them. With Orient slowed by the effort of restraining Arc’s authority, the attackers close in on a train crowded with passengers and only partly prepared to fight. Yuan Guang’s response—taking responsibility for the beast rather than abandoning weight to escape—makes the raid a test of both the train’s defenses and his changing resolve.

Detection and Vulnerability

The warning arrives while Yuan is occupied with the painful work of tuning his body to the Gun Path and its branches. He anticipates that adapting his bullet-core will be worse, but remains committed to enduring the pain for victory. Orient’s whistle is followed by an announcement: a large dust cloud is approaching from the south, and she suspects a sizable vehicle fleet is coming to intercept the train. Yuan recognizes the likely attackers as the Plastic Men and rises to prepare for action.

Orient’s speed disadvantage has a specific cost. She has redirected a sizable amount of her qi to suppress Arc’s authority, while also doubling her length. The resulting train is therefore both burdened and easier for the fleet to catch. When Yuan reaches the fire wagon’s roof, the dust cloud already blankets a broad stretch of desert and is rapidly gaining ground. His assessment draws on several senses: he reads strengthening vibrations in the air, identifies the vehicles by the smell of burnt fuel, and notices yellow smoke mingled with the dust. He counts twenty-three vehicles, mostly cars with a few motorbikes, and detects something heavier than the entire fleet among them.

The Warband and Its Beast

Yuan identifies the heavier presence as a Trashemoth, a spirit-beast with a kinship to the Plastic Men. He warns the defenders that the raiders have brought one. The beast is a colossus at least twice the size of the only Trashemoth Yuan had previously seen, and as long as three of Orient’s wagons. Its sluglike bulk is built from accumulated plastic trash, gelatinous gasoline ooze, and orange sinew; metal talons on its forelimbs are sharp enough to cut a house in two.

The vehicles ahead of it form no orderly army. The raiding party includes dirty mannequin bikers, trash trucks packed with humanoids whose faces are black bags and whose hands are tableware, and cars assembled from scavenged parts. Some of the few First Coil cultivators have fused with their vehicles: one is little more than a plastic torso joined to a motorbike, while others appear as rubber masses filling car seats. Their disorganized advance and disregard for self-preservation make them seem less like a conventional force than shepherds driving the giant forward.

Preparing the Train’s Defense

The passengers have weapons and ammunition, but Yuan doubts that most know how to use them effectively. On the roof, several gunners take positions at the train’s three artillery pieces, with Bucket manning the cannon nearest the locomotive. Iron barrels protrude from windows along the length of the train, and passengers on the upper floors carry Molotov cocktails, named for a famous folk Fire Path cultivator, ready to ignite as the enemy approaches.

Yuan decides the division of labor: the gunners should target the escort, while he handles the Trashemoth. Bucket volunteers to fire on the beast, promising to blow it away before it can touch Orient, but Yuan rejects the plan. Even artillery would struggle to penetrate the creature’s hide, he judges, whereas the Plastic Men’s vehicles are more vulnerable targets. The distinction leaves the train’s ordinary defenders to hinder the raiding party while Yuan takes on the threat most capable of overwhelming them.

The Opening Assault

The Plastic Men’s weapons reveal their preference for close killing. A few return fire with flash-ball weapons and rubber bullets, but most press forward rather than exchange shots at range. Harpoons rise from the backs of their trash trucks, barbed heads aimed toward Orient’s windows, ready to launch once the vehicles are close enough. The danger is immediate: a successful strike could turn the train’s windows into entry points for the raiders.

Yuan’s first shot hits the Trashemoth’s right eye with the force of a qi-charged handgun strike. It is less spectacular than Revolver’s shooting stars, but it blows apart its target; yellow pus and poisonous blood run down the beast’s face as its main maw bellows. The passengers’ return fire is less effective. A few find their marks, but most are untrained and the attackers are still too far away. Bucket and the other artillery gunners do better: one shell destroys a car, another lands close enough to send two motorcycles off course, and a third misses.

When the harpoons threaten to come within range, Yuan does not retreat. He leaps from the train and crosses the distance in a single bound, landing on a Plastic Man’s car hard enough to crush its engine. The vehicle and its drivers are thrown from their wheels; before that crash is complete, Yuan has already launched himself toward the next car with a Recoil Kick. The raid thus meets a defender who has chosen to enter the attackers’ formation rather than wait behind the train’s guns.

A Changed Response

Yuan recognizes that his decision would have surprised his earlier self. A month before, his instinct would have been to discard extra weight from the spirit-train and increase its speed rather than risk a confrontation with a dangerous spirit-beast. Now he speaks and acts as though he can face the Trashemoth, and his allies’ lack of alarm suggests they share that confidence. The raid turns this shift into action: protection of the train and its passengers takes precedence over escape, even when the threat is a creature resistant to artillery.

That choice resonates with the novel’s wider landscape of industrial and environmental ruin, though those wider disasters are distinct from the raid itself. Elsewhere, Yuan encounters poisonous dust rising from the diseased ruins of an old city, while the history recounted by Mordiggian describes industrial corporations transformed into greedy spirits that strip the earth of resources. Here, the accumulated plastic, fuel, and scavenged machinery are not merely scenery: they compose the raiders’ vehicles and the Trashemoth’s body, joining the attackers’ material world into a single advancing mass. The opening of the assault leaves the contest unresolved, but establishes the conflict’s terms: a slowed train, a poorly trained defense, a close-range warband, and Yuan moving directly into danger.