Then every phone screen in the carriage flashed white.
A wave of light slammed through the train.
Not from above or below, but from nowhere Kai could place.
Symbols burst across the air like shattered glass frozen in place. Thin blue lines. Boxes. Rotating circles. Text formed and vanished too quickly to read.
The sound came after.
A chime, soft and bright, like a notification tone played inside his skull.
Passengers cried out.
Several dropped their phones.
One woman near the door started praying under her breath.
Kai's hand tightened around the edge of his seat.
Words settled in front of his face.
SYSTEM INITIALIZATION IN PROGRESS
He stared.
The text wasn't on a screen. It hovered there, clear and cold, less than a foot from his nose.
When he jerked back, it moved with him.
No projector, he thought at once. No prank. No—
More lines opened.
BIOMETRIC LATTICE ESTABLISHED
SPECIES: HUMAN
WORLDSTATE THRESHOLD MET
ASSIGNMENT PHASE BEGINNING
A man near the far end shouted, "What the hell is this?"
His answer arrived as screaming.
The sound tore through the carriage from two rows ahead of Kai.
Everyone turned.
A woman in business clothes had collapsed into the aisle. Her briefcase lay open beside her, papers scattered over the dirty train floor.
At first Kai thought she was having a seizure.
Her back arched. Heels hammered against the ground. Fingers clawed at her throat.
Then her skin moved.
Not metaphorically.
It rippled under her blouse and along her neck as if something alive were swimming beneath it.
People recoiled so fast they slammed into seats and each other.
"Oh my God," someone whispered.
The woman across from Kai was already standing.
Paperback forgotten on the seat.
"Don't touch her."
Nobody had been about to.
That warning was for the brave and the stupid.
The big man in the gray jacket pushed into the aisle anyway.
"Move."
"Don't—" Kai started.
Too late.
The man bent, grabbed the writhing woman by the shoulder, and she convulsed so hard her head cracked against the floor with a wet sound.
The big man jerked back.
Her mouth opened wider than it should have.
A black thread spilled out between her teeth.
No.
Not a thread.
A leg.
The thing forced itself through her mouth in a slick rush, chitin scraping against teeth as the woman made one awful, bubbling sound—
and stopped moving.
For one frozen second, the creature hung halfway out of her face.
Glossy black.
Too many jointed limbs.
A body the size of a large dog, compressed into something born from a nightmare and bad geometry.
Then it tore free.
Passengers exploded into panic.
The monster landed in the aisle with a hard clack and sprang at once. It moved so fast Kai almost lost it—a blur of black shell and pale hooked limbs.
It hit a man near the door and drove him backward into the glass partition.
Blood sprayed the window in a fan.
The carriage became chaos.
People shoved, climbed over seats, screamed for help that wasn't coming.
Someone tried to force the train door open while it was still moving.
Someone else vomited.
The teenager with the backpack made a strangled noise and swung his paper cup like it was a weapon.
It actually hit the creature.
Hot coffee splashed over its back.
The thing recoiled with a shriek so sharp it made Kai's ears ring.
For half a second, everyone paused.
The teenager stared at his empty cup.
"No way," he said.
Then the creature launched at him.
Kai moved before he finished thinking.
He caught the teenager by the backpack strap and yanked him sideways.
The monster slammed into the pole by the door hard enough to dent metal.
The teenager crashed into Kai instead, all elbows and panic.
"I had that," the kid gasped.
"You had a cup."
"It was working!"
The absurdity almost made Kai laugh, and maybe that was why he didn't freeze.
The older man with one arm was shouting now, voice hard as iron.
"Get low and get behind the seats! Stop crowding the aisle!"
People listened.
Not everyone, but enough.
The woman with the paperback grabbed a sobbing office worker and shoved her down between two seat rows before spinning away from a slashing limb.
She moved fast.
Not strong, but precise.
She wasn't panicking either. Her face had gone very still.
The big man had recovered from his first mistake and ripped off his jacket, wrapping it around his forearm before stepping toward the creature with a look that said violence was a language he spoke well.
He was angry.
Good, Kai thought. Angry people still moved.
Blue text kept bursting in front of passengers as if the world had decided this was an excellent moment for paperwork.
CLASS ASSIGNED: BRAWLER
CLASS ASSIGNED: SEEKER
CLASS ASSIGNED: WARDEN
Voices rose in confusion.
"I got something—"
"What is Seeker?"
"Why can I see stats?"
"My eyes, my eyes, what is happening?"
Kai didn't get any of that.
He saw the windows.
The screaming.
The monster pivoting toward the cluster of trapped passengers near the center of the car.
Then his own blue screen opened.
It looked different.
The letters were thinner.
Sharper somehow.
USER: UNREGISTERED
STATUS: MARKED OBSERVER
PROTOCOL: DEVIATION
Kai stopped breathing.
No class followed.
No stats.
No explanation.