An eerie silence governed the interior of the Mist Train, as if the outside world had been cut away. From the worn wooden seats wafted a stale, clinging smell—the persistent scent of old sweat mixed with the foul soot of incinerated divine spirit cores. Koyoi leaned against the unyielding backrest, feeling the rhythmic thud-thud of steel wheels against the rails vibrating through her ribs.
The pale blue light of the lanterns flickered with the train's violent jolts, casting shadows that stretched and shrank like living things. Koyoi’s eyes were drawn to a passenger sitting across the aisle, shrouded from head to toe in black vestments. Where his face should have been was a featureless white mask.
He sat perfectly still, clutching an old wooden box as if it were his own heart. His presence lacked any natural warmth; it chilled the air and exposed the unnatural seams of reality. A shiver ran down Koyoi's spine, and she reached into her drawstring pouch to check on the gods within.
At the bottom of the pouch, the Moon God pulsed with sharp silver warnings. The Wind God whipped up a gale, reviling the scent of stagnant death. Only the Glass God remained calm, its reflections analyzing the invisible waves of energy within the man's box.
Gathering their cries through her soul, Koyoi realized this carriage was warping into a massive otherworld. Kuon narrowed his prosthetic left eye, tracking the microscopic dust of Providence like a cold sensor.
"Watch yourself," Kuon said. "The laws in here are breaking. That man has forced fragments of a Nameless God into his body."
"Is he an Observer?" Koyoi asked.
"No. His rhythm is different. He's a grave robber—scavenging the residues of Providence leaking from the Great Archive."
Kuon wiped his forehead, enduring the searing overload behind his eye.
"They really exist?" Koyoi whispered.
"Yeah. They’re the lowest of the low, mining deleted gods to sell on the black market. To them, a god is just a power source."
Hatred and bloodlust laced his words, born from his own past as a test subject. Koyoi watched the eerie blue light leaking from the man's box burn into her retinas. As the train crossed an iron bridge over a deep valley, the mist thickened and the distortion of reality reached its peak. Soot particles rose from the floorboards, swirling in gravity-defying spirals.
Koyoi felt herself lift from her seat and instinctively grabbed Asahi’s arm. He gripped her hand and drove his greatsword into the floor, anchoring them to this unstable reality.
In that instant, the lanterns vanished. In the absolute black, the wooden box pulsed with a malevolent crimson light. Ink-black stains spread across the man's mask, forming the words Help me... help me...—thousands of grudges etched into the surface.
Koyoi’s breath locked in her chest; she couldn’t even scream. Kuon’s eye captured the ghosts of thousands of dead gods layered behind the man.
"The box is full of compressed lamentations," Kuon muttered. "The Sentinels of the Archive won't let that pass."
"Sentinels?" Koyoi asked.
"The Archive is a tomb for the world’s rightful records. It’s guarded by heartless Keepers programmed to erase any impurity."
The train's whistle let out a dying shriek, and the lights flickered back. The man was gone. No shadow, no trace—only a fluttering curtain and a trail of black soot remained. Koyoi’s heart hammered against her ribs as she exhaled a shuddering breath.
Asahi wiped a smudge of black dust from his blade. "Looks like the poison got to us before we even arrived," he said dryly, tracing the words Great Archive on their ticket. Kuon stared out the window at the silhouette of a massive black gate emerging from the mist.
"There it is. The final repository. From here on, a single misstep means our complete erasure. It’s a desperate gamble."
His words were no longer a warning, but a declaration of war. Koyoi clutched her pouch, feeling the warmth of her gods—the silver light, the soft breath, the sharp reflection. They were her only weapons to cut through the darkness.
The train didn't slow; it only accelerated, plunging into the abyss. The screech of steel tore through the soot and rattled their eardrums. Outside, the world dissolved into a torrent of light as the boundaries of reality converged. Koyoi pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Through a rift in the mist, the black gate loomed.