"Don’t speak," Razor breathed, his voice barely above the threshold of hearing. "Don’t move. Don’t look at it. Don’t answer it. Whatever it says. Whatever it asks."

  David activated True Sight.

  The corridor, already dim, darkened further. Through the cabin door’s narrow window, he could see—not with his eyes but with the analytical overlay of his talent—a column of black pollution moving through the hallway. The entity within it radiated an aura so dense it bent the visual spectrum around itself, creating a gravitational lensing effect that distorted the wall sconces behind it.

  This was not a mid-tier entity. This was something that operated at a fundamentally higher permission level than anything David had encountered so far on the train.

  It came into view.

  A woman. Or what remained of one. She wore a maternity dress that had been white once and was now the color of old bandages. Her belly was distended to an impossible degree—not the proportional roundness of late pregnancy but a geometric aberration, as if something inside had outgrown the container and was pressing against the abdominal wall hard enough to make the skin translucent. Beneath that skin, purplish-black veins pulsed with a rhythm that didn’t match any human circulatory pattern.

  Her hair hung over her face. Black fluid—thicker than blood, with the consistency of motor oil—wept from her eye sockets and dripped onto the carpet, leaving marks that hissed faintly on contact.

  She walked with the shuffling gait of someone whose pelvis had been broken and improperly reset. Every step was a small catastrophe of skeletal mechanics.

  And she was crying.

  "My baby... my baby is gone..."

  The voice carried a pollution payload that David’s True Sight rendered as a visible wavefront—a pulse of black static that expanded from her mouth like a sonar ping, washing over every surface, every door, every living thing in its radius. Where the wave touched David’s consciousness, he felt his thoughts stutter—a momentary desynchronization, as if his internal clock had skipped a beat.

  [WARNING: High-Tier Roaming Entity — "The Weeping Mother."]

  [Pollution Level: EXTREME.]

  [Do not maintain eye contact for more than 3 seconds.]

  [Do not answer her questions.]

  [Do not engage.]

  The warnings scrolled across David’s retinas in urgent red. He didn’t need them. His body had already made the assessment: this entity was beyond his current combat capability. The Shadow Bear Spirit, S-Rank and growing, could have handled the suited entity upstairs. It could have handled the bathroom’s red-light occupant. It could not handle this.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The pregnant woman reached their cabin door.

  BANG.

  A pale hand—the veins standing out like blue wiring under translucent skin—slammed against the glass window of the door. The force was enough to crack the glass in a starburst pattern radiating from her palm print.

  Razor stopped breathing. Literally—David could see, from his peripheral vision, the veteran’s chest locked in a held inhale, his face turning slowly from white to purple.

  On the upper right bunk, the suited entity—the one that had been casually eating a human thigh twenty minutes ago—went completely still. It lay flat, limbs rigid, a perfect imitation of an inanimate object. Even the entities feared this thing.

  The woman’s face pressed against the cracked glass. Her eyes were there—not holes like the suited entity’s, but actual eyes, milk-white and pupilless, the sclera marbled with burst capillaries. They scanned the cabin with a desperate, frantic energy that was somehow worse than malice.

  "Baby... are you here? Did you... see my baby?"

  The pollution wave from her voice was stronger at close range. David felt it hit his prefrontal cortex like a wave of static—a compulsion to respond, to open his mouth, to say something, anything. The way a phone’s autocomplete keeps trying to finish your sentence. His jaw muscles activated involuntarily, the first syllable of a response forming on his tongue before his conscious mind caught it and shut it down.

  He deployed the Shadow Bear Spirit instead. Not as a weapon—as camouflage. The shadow at his feet expanded silently, wrapping his body in a layer of darkness that suppressed his biological signature. Heat, breath, the electromagnetic field of a living nervous system—all of it damped to near-zero.

  The woman’s white eyes swept the cabin. Passed over the flat-lining suited entity. Passed over Razor, who had achieved the pallor of a genuine corpse through sheer terror. Passed over the shadow where David lay—and moved on.

  "Not here... no one is here..."

  She let out a sound that wasn’t quite a scream and wasn’t quite a sob. It was the sound of something that had been looking for a very long time and had started to forget what it was looking for. Her nails scored a long scratch in the glass as she pulled away from the door.

  Thump. Drag. Thump. Drag.

  The footsteps receded toward the next car. The pollution aura contracted, diminished, and eventually fell below David’s detection threshold.

  Razor exhaled so explosively it sounded like a gunshot. He sagged against the wall, his scar livid against the rest of his face’s grey complexion. "What... what tier is that thing?"

  David didn’t answer the question. He was already out of his bunk, pulling on his boots, checking his coat.

  "What are you doing?" Razor’s voice cracked. "She could come back—"

  "She won’t," David said. "She’s moving car by car, on a patrol loop. We have at least fifteen minutes before she circles back." He nodded toward the corridor. "And she just did us a favor."

  Razor stared at him blankly.

  David pointed toward the bathroom. The indicator light above the door had changed.

  Green.

  "The red-light entity was territorial," David explained, already moving toward the door. "She’s higher-tier. Her pollution aura suppressed it. Forced it into hibernation. The bathroom is clear."

  "You can’t be serious," Razor whispered.

  David was already in the corridor, walking toward the bathroom where a boy had been pulled through a crack and eaten twenty minutes ago. The green light hummed quietly above the door, casting a small circle of safety on the blood-streaked floor.

  He pushed the door open and stepped inside.