As expected, soon after the car-hop, Ace followed along at a very brisk, but heavy pace. If it felt cold inside the train, it was nothing like outside of it. Nobody likes sweating anywhere colder than 30 degrees Fahrenheit, but Ace wanted answers, and this man clearly had them hidden somewhere in his stupid, fancy-ass suit.

"Where you gonna run now!?" he managed to shout out between his heavy breaths, approaching so much more quickly than he seemed he should be able to.

---

When the few soldiers left finally reached where Casey had been hanging from, imagine their collective surprise when their target was nowhere to be found, and they were left almost entirely empty of ammunition after covering their own advance. They clearly hadn't counted on any opposition beyond the ragtag team that had been dispatched earlier, but even as several of their guns gave the tell-tale 'clik-clik' of an empty magazine, they still held them close... the enemy didn't need to know they were out.

Bandolier made several coordinated motions with his hands, and soon after, all five of them hopped down to the train platforms. Two of them went in the direction Casey had crawled through, and the other three, Mr. Bandolier included, went the other... into the same car of one particular green hedgehog. His little diatribe might have to wait.

Hunched over with his hands on his knees, the rat couldn't help but smirk at the cat's words. He straightened himself out and stared his follower down. While there was still some good distance between them, he called out, "Tell me, boy! I'd like to know who you're working for! They must be very interesting to send someone like you!"

He was bouncing on his feet a little, ready to take off running again if he needed. The cold was bitter, but it was at his back. His tail was freezing and his ears and face were feeling a bit numb from running through the wind in nothing more than a fancy suit, but hopefully he wouldn't have to put up with this nonsense for too much longer. Things had not gone as planned, but as long as he was breathing, there was still a chance.

"Hmph."

He scoffed a bit at the reaction that Desmond had to his statement. Then came the questioning from Geoff. He looked at him, half-lidded and a hand on his hip. Once he was done, Archer simply took a deep breath, as if wondering where to begin.

"I really don't," He started to say, but Geoff's glance toward the top hatch instinctively made him do the same..then he snapped back to Geoff, "But I'm just a ticket puncher. My interest in the crate is simply a matter of curiosity. But I'm probably not going to find out. I know one thing, though. Whatever it is, it'd probably be bad news if those masked gunmen got ahold of it..."

It was kind of amusing that the one point on which Archer was telling the truth, Geoff seemed to have the most trouble believing. That being said, however, the diplomatic approach would come to a halt as, just as predicted, three of those gunmen in question dropped into the car.

Upon seeing them, Archer instinctively bent down and grabbed his bow and dove over the crate to cover.

Archer landed on someone when he jumped over the crate to take cover: two more combatants who had been laying in wait to clobber him. It was dark back there and hard to tell exactly what was going on, but the deer dropped straight into a tangle of people, and a lot of nigh-cartoon-dustcloud-quality grabbing, clubbing, and general hitting ensued.

It would have taken an excessively observant and astute individual to take note of the detail that there had been five shady guys in long coats hanging around the freight car before it left station, and only three had been dealt with. Nonetheless, after hiding behind the cargo through Geoff and Archer's entire conversation (perhaps in hopes that they'd duke it out with each other first), the two remaining escorts had been foist into the fight.

Casey raised his big body of burl up over the pile of luggage he'd taken as cover, pointed his gun over the top, and ambushed the incoming troops, or thugs, or whatever they were. Whether it was a matter of poor accuracy from being perched against a pile of loose luggage or his own morality was hard to tell at first, but the shots came nowhere near any vital target. Instead, they all went quite low, and traced a squiggly line of fire at just about knee level across the incoming group.

So he wasn't a hardened gunarm-slinging killer, apparently, but he had markedly little concern for the preservation of kneecaps. (When your primary means of assault is a big machine gun and you don't like killing people, you make the best of it you can.)

Now imagine Archer's surprise when he unwittingly discovered two unaccounted for guards. Mid-dive, his eyes widened, and he was completely unprepared for what happened next. As he landed on one of them, the other no doubt took the opportunity to pounce. It was clear however, that they were no more ready for him than he was for them. With no elbow room, all he could really do was flail -- luckily, though, he was a pretty mean flailer.

In the midst of the sad display of impromptu combat, Archer finally managed to plant a firm palm into the side of the guy's face that he had landed on, pressing the opposite side of his face into the steel floor as he simultaneously swung his head back in the hopes of smacking the other guy in the face. Assuming this all went down without too much issue, he would take the opportunity to roll away from them.

As he climbed to his feet as quickly as he could, only a few feet away, he gripped his bow with both hands and lunged at one of the guards who were no doubt just as quick on the recovery. He would meet them with a swing of his bow aimed at the side of the guy's head as if he was wielding a baseball bat, and not a ranged weapon.

"GYUAAHHAHH."

Everyone screamed in the same language-- this one was no different. Sure enough, one of the pair on Casey's end buckled violently at the knees, and... well, screamed again, before falling to his side without even knowing where his attacker was. It may have felt nice to know that, as organized and violent as these troops were, they were still ultimately mere mortals, and big bullets worked on them as well as they would anyone else. The second in the boar's line of sight was a little faster than that, however, and was quick to make a mad dash back to the platform outdoors. He responded in kind with blindfire-- sticking little more than his hand out and peppering out three quick bursts before the noise of gunfire was replaced by a gut-wrenching click.

And as for Geoff and Archer's car? Well... the minute the deer managed to get two square feet of distance between himself and the longcoats, there probably wasn't going to be much more of a brawl in the first place... unless the hedgehog wanted to have one. As it was, the gunmen either didn't recognize Geoff as a threat, or simply didn't see any reason to fight with him in the first place. With that in mind, one of them took a pretty nasty crystal-induced pratfall to his back. It was clear it hurt by the way he groaned and clutched his head and shouted (either obscenities or a mission update, one couldn't be sure), but the remaining two kept their priorities on their original targets.

Between the two of them, there were still plenty enough ammunition to take down the longcoats. Provided their aim was true (which it was), and no more Eggman anti-bullet devices were in play, the new duo's backs were quickly going to be that much heavier with lead.

---

Ace picked up a subtle smirk while he answered as only he could. "If I were you, I'd be more interested in me!" He continued his advance, but at a more comfortable pace-- for the both of them. "I just took the wrong train at the right time-- chalk it up to bad luck!" Maybe the cat was just in a lousy mood. Perhaps understandably so, considering the lousy week, or couple of weeks he'd been having. But regardless of the cause, he was all too eager to relieve his stress all over this smarmy rat's face. As proof of this ideal, the last word out of his mouth was immediately punctuated with not only an explanation point, but another trio of chaos cards tearing through the air. By then, he was close enough for a chance at them making their mark, and this time, they were flung horizontally as well, around waist level.

The mouse was primed and ready to take off at a moment's notice, and as soon as he saw those cards coming, he did. He jumped up in place, the cards harmlessly passing a under his feet, several inches away from his soles. As soon as his feet hit the surface again, he bolted towards his persistent attacker while retorting with a sudden incredulous anger and frustration, "You can't honestly expect me to believe that, can you?! I refuse to fail just because of simple bad luck!"

He raised his fist high as the distance between them closed, eyes narrowed and teeth grit, ready to take a running swing at the cat. When there was just a few feet between them, the mouse feinted.

Instead of taking a swing, he ducked to the side and flopped onto the car, where he quickly rolled off the side before he could be caught. Before he could fall off the train and meet a painful demise on the side of the tracks, and with the right twist to get the angle right, the mouse gripped the cold edge of the car, turning his fall into a swing. Quickly bending his legs forward, his boots soon met a window that easily gave way to the rat's momentum with a clearly audible shatter. Broken glass smashed to the floor of the passenger car's interior, followed by the mouse himself, who only needed a second to recover from the risky acrobatics before he was already slamming the door open and running down the aisle of the car, towards the rear of the train yet again.

With his pursuer still stuck on the roof in the freezing cold wind, it would take him quite a while to catch up to the mouse now, unless the cat was dumb enough to imitate that stunt. The suited man gave himself a mental congratulations for pulling that trick off, but lamented the fact that his fine suit was now covered with snow and bits of glass.

In no time at all, the mouse was making the leap between the two passenger cars, seemingly nothing between him and the valued cargo except...

...the baggage car full of that cat's friends...

He decided he would deal with that problem when it came up.

Casey winced and ducked a little as bullets flew wild through the baggage car. There had been shots flying through it from the helicopter before (literally, as in, through the car's walls), and now they were just being sprayed in by a soldier. While the hog was not inclined to go be a hero and charge any armed troops, he felt a duty to stand his ground.

So, he took a cue from the chopper pilot and shot right at the sheet-metal wall next to the door—that is, right through the blind-firing gunman's cover.

Following that, he took a moment to edge over to the wall of the car and take a peek out one of the many large-bore bulletholes left by the chopper to get a bearing on its position.

"They really want whatever's in that box car, bad," he observed.

That left two options: Let the attackers have it, or fight for it. His sense of adventure wanted to know what was in it, but he had a pretty high priority on not getting a bunch of fresh 20mm body piercings, so he remained torn.

The fight between the two coated thugs and Archer soon got pretty sloppy. Telling what was going on in that chaotic environment was hard enough, so when he came swinging a bow at one of their heads, the guy pretty much took it full force and staggered to the side. His buddy meanwhile made a series of brisk thrusts back at Archer with some sort of stun baton—looked just like one of the standard-issue Eggman Army models.

And this was just assuming that none of them yet got hit by any stray fire from the troops who had dropped in through the ceiling hatch. It was getting nuts in there.