The bathroom was a crime scene that the cleaning crew had declined to attend.

  Blood on the walls—not spatter patterns but radial sprays, the kind produced when a contained volume of pressurized fluid is suddenly released. The trajectory analysis was consistent with Kid’s body being compressed through the door gap: high-velocity arterial spray from multiple simultaneous breach points.

  David stepped inside and locked the door. The bolt was a simple slide mechanism, and he tested it twice to confirm it engaged fully.

  The space was minimal: a toilet stall at the far end, a sink with a mirror, a flickering fluorescent tube overhead. The floor was tile, cracked, and covered in a film of diluted blood that had been partially mopped by something—or someone—that didn’t care about doing a thorough job.

  The stall door was closed. Beneath it: a pair of feet in black leather shoes. Uniform shoes. Conductor’s shoes.

  And from behind the door: the wet, concentrated sound of eating. Not the suited entity’s casual, commuter-style chewing. This was focused. Rapid. The sound of something consuming evidence before it could be discovered.

  David’s True Sight flared gold.

  Through the stall door, the entity was visible as a dense mass of pollution—less intense than the Weeping Mother but concentrated, localized, a tight kernel of corrupted data. It wore a conductor’s uniform: hat, jacket, brass buttons. Where its face should have been, there was only a smooth, veined expanse of skin—no eyes, no nose, no mouth on the head at all.

  Its mouth was in its chest. The torso was split vertically, the ribcage flared open like the pages of a book, revealing a cavity lined with interlocking teeth. Kid’s arm—still recognizable by the school uniform sleeve—hung from a gap between two ribs.

  [Mid-Tier Polluted Entity: Faceless Conductor.]

  [Authority: Partial train management. Controls ticket verification, car access, and lock protocols.]

  [Threat: Chest-mounted feeding apparatus. Contact results in "Fare Evader" designation — hunted by all entities on the train.]

  [Note: Carries administrative access key.]

  Administrative access key. There it was. The conductor wasn’t just a threat—it was an objective.

  In any system, the entity responsible for access control is both the gatekeeper and the single point of failure. Kill the gatekeeper, inherit the keys. It was the same principle whether you were hacking a network or raiding a dungeon.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The question was execution. The bathroom was narrow—two meters wide, maybe four long. The conductor’s chest-mouth had a reach of approximately one meter based on the proportions David could see through the stall door. In this space, a missed dodge meant a direct hit.

  But David had something the conductor didn’t: a summon that operated in three dimensions.

  "Bear," David whispered, so quietly the word was more a vibration of his throat than an actual vocalization.

  The shadow at his feet stirred. The Shadow Bear Spirit had been growing denser since consuming the entity’s residual energy in the haunted house. Now, fed by the ambient pollution of a 3-Star dungeon, it had the mass and presence of something that belonged here.

  David pointed at the stall door.

  The bear understood. It had been a child’s toy once. It had been a monster. Now it was a weapon with the emotional intelligence of neither and the killing efficiency of both.

  It struck.

  The stall door exploded inward. The Shadow Bear Spirit materialized fully—two meters of dense, midnight-black mass—and its first blow landed directly on the conductor’s featureless face. The impact was percussive, a sound like a sledgehammer hitting wet sand. The conductor’s head caved in along a line that no human skull would have produced—a diagonal compression that suggested the skull’s geometry wasn’t entirely bone.

  The conductor reacted. Its chest-mouth snapped wide, the interlocking teeth grinding in an attempt to catch the bear’s paw. But the bear was faster, and meaner, and operating with the S-Rank advantage of something that had been purpose-built for violence. Its jaws clamped onto the conductor’s chest cavity and crushed the feeding apparatus in a single, grinding bite.

  The entity spasmed. Dark fluid sprayed from every seam in its uniform. It clawed at the bear with hands that had fingers but no fingernails—smooth, blunt digits that slid uselessly off the bear’s spectral fur.

  "Enough," David said. "Hold it."

  The bear pinned the conductor to the floor. David knelt beside the dying entity and, with the clinical detachment of a surgeon reaching into an open body cavity, searched its uniform pockets.

  His fingers closed around a brass key. Heavy, old, warm in a way that metal shouldn’t be. On the key’s head, an engraving he recognized instantly: the thorny golden eye of the Genesis Consortium.

  [Key Item Acquired: Conductor’s Master Key (Replica).]

  [Function: Unlocks any sealed door in Cars 1–12.]

  [Restriction: Cannot unlock the absolute restricted zone — Car 13.]

  David held the key up to the fluorescent light. The Consortium’s logo caught the light and threw a distorted shadow on the wall—an eye, watching.

  "Eat," he told the bear. "Quietly."

  The bear consumed the conductor with the efficiency of a garbage disposal. Bones, uniform, brass buttons, and all. When it finished, the only evidence the conductor had existed was a dark stain on the tile and the fading echo of a crunch.

  David pocketed the key and turned to the mirror.