Chapter 139: Express
I hand out two beads to each of them.
[Leviathanic Beads: 8 → 2]
"Let’s not improvise. Everyone pays their own. Each of you places your beads into the eye holes of a mannequin. Find the real ones. Not the copies."
Rhayne pushes herself up off Lola’s lap. One arm hanging dead at her side, the other already moving. She walks the aisle slowly. Stops in front of a figure that rocks at the correct beat. Takes a moment. Sets both beads into the eye holes one-handed.
The mannequin deflates.
The white uniform collapses. Dark smoke drifts up and dissipates. The mask rests face-up on the bench.
Rhayne picks it up with her good hand, walks it down to the guard, and hands it over.
[Three passengers remaining to pay.]
My brain catches on the number a second too late.
Three.
We’re four people. Two of us have paid. That leaves two.
Not three.
"Something’s wrong," I say out loud. "We’re four. Two have paid. Why three left?"
The squad stops. Rhayne turns her head slowly. Lola cocks hers. Oliver’s eyes cut to the corners of the car without his body turning—scanning for whatever the system just told him is here.
Somewhere in this car, there’s a fifth thing.
Not showing up on my senses. Not sitting on a bench. Counted by the system but invisible to us.
Oliver is already walking toward a figure he’s picked. He places his beads. The mannequin dissolves. He collects the mask and walks it to the guard.
[Two passengers remaining to pay.]
"Looks like we’ve got a stowaway in here with them, boss."
"I don’t know if it’s a stowaway. I’m not getting anything off these things. No energy, nothing."
I think while Lola walks to her own pick, places her beads with careful little fingers, and collects her mask. She brings it to the guard and drops it into its open hand without making eye contact with the thing.
[One passenger remaining to pay.]
The number outside the window hits 234. Twenty-one signals left. Less time than I’d like.
"We’re running out of time."
I draw Eventide.
The blade wakes up humming. The shadow-edge curls off it slow and hungry.
Every mask in the car turns.
At the same instant. Every head, every seat, every row—all of them swivel to face me. And behind the oval eye holes, something lights up. Red. A uniform red, identical across every mask, like someone flipped a single switch that connects to all of them.
The temperature in the car drops.
"Get ready. We fight."
I step toward one of the real ones—one I’d already clocked, one of the originals.
I raise Eventide and start the cut move.
My body locks.
Just for a second. Every signal from my brain to my arm stops arriving, and I’m standing frozen with the blade halfway through its arc.
A small ball of light pushes out of my forehead.
Right where Chronia touched me.
It lifts away from my skin. Pale gold. Hovering. It’s the size of a marble and it pulls every shadow in the car toward it, throwing macabre contrast across the masked figures around us.
It drifts. Erratic. Unhurried. Tracing slow loops through the air like a firefly that hasn’t decided where it’s going yet.
It floats past the benches. Past the rows of red eyes.
And touches the guard’s mask.
The guard folds.
Not into pieces. Into a point. The body collapses in on itself and becomes a vortex—something like a black hole the size of a door, pulling everything toward it in a sucking roar of displaced air.
Every mannequin in the car is yanked off its bench. They hurtle toward the vortex in a single torrent—white uniforms, masks, bodies that aren’t bodies, all of them ripped toward the same point and swallowed.
My feet don’t move.
None of us move.
The four of us standing inside a hurricane and nothing is pulling on us. The air roars past on every side. My ears pop from the pressure change. But the floor under my boots is quiet and my weight stays where I put it. Whatever is happening here, we aren’t on the list of things being erased.
"What the hell?" I say, because I don’t have anything else.
"What did you do?" Rhayne has already grabbed an iron rail bolted along the ceiling with her good hand. Her dead arm swings loose beside her.
"I didn’t do anything..."
"I warned everyone." Lola crosses her arms. "The crystal broke him."
A few seconds more. The vortex closes. The car goes quiet.
The black walls are still black. The benches are still there. But the passengers are gone. The violet strip along the baseboard is the only light left in the car, and now it’s enough—there’s nothing else to see.
The notice above the door updates.
[All passengers have paid the ticket.]
So the light was a passenger? Only four left now...
The door’s locks begin to unseat themselves. Mechanical clicks, one after another. The door slides open.
I look at my squad, waiting for my signal.
"Let’s go..."
Then the quest updates. All four of us, at the same time.
[You have attacked the Train Conductor.]
[Mission failed.]
[The Engineer is awakening.]
So Chronia helped me and screwed me at the same time.
How generous.
Everything in this system is broken in so many different directions I’ve stopped trying to parse what’s Chaos Theory pulling its threads and what’s simply the universe deciding I need to suffer today. Somewhere there’s probably a distinction, but I don’t have time to find it.
"Looks like that light show of yours broke it, boss." Oliver is holding back a laugh, one hand on his ribs to keep the laugh from happening.
"I didn’t do anything. It’s hard to explain, but that crystal I touched did something to me."
"Poor little thing..." Lola says, looking up at me with exaggerated pity.
I exhale slow and start walking toward the door.
"Let’s move. I don’t want to find out what an Engineer looks like."
A new notification lands on my HUD.
[The Engineer is opening a portal to the Express Line.]
[Objective: Stop the Engineer or find a solution.]
[Reward: Survival.]
When the reward for a quest is staying alive, everyone already knows what the failure state is.