Finding Razor required using the Warden’s system-level access to query the player routing database—a function David was acutely aware could draw attention if used carelessly. His permissions were legitimate, but a Warden process querying individual player locations was outside normal operational parameters. The system wouldn’t flag it immediately, but it would log the anomaly, and if the Consortium’s monitoring picked up the log, questions would follow.

  David ran the query once. Clean, targeted, minimal footprint. Like a surgical incision: in, data, out.

  [Player "Razor" — Status: Active — Current Location: Hub Bazaar (Layer 1) — Recent Activity: 4-Star Dungeon Clear ("The Drowned Parish")]

  Razor had survived the Ghost Train and kept climbing. Four-star. The scarred veteran had found his own path upward while David had been imprisoned in the Penitentiary.

  David parked the Midnight Express in the Hub’s spectral harbor and entered the Bazaar on foot. The 14-second flag loops. The 45-second music cycles. The 60Hz lantern flicker. All exactly as he’d left them—the simulation didn’t change because simulations weren’t designed to.

  He found Razor at a weapons stall in the eastern market, haggling with an NPC vendor over a pair of reinforced gauntlets. The scar tissue on Razor’s arms had accumulated since the Ghost Train—new marks layered over old ones, a topographic record of dungeons survived. His gear was better: heavier, darker, inscribed with defensive runes that pulsed faintly at the edges.

  Razor saw David and went very still. The haggling stopped. His hand moved—not to a weapon, but to the spot on his belt where a weapon would be drawn from if the situation required it. The instinct of a man who’d learned that familiar faces in the Abyss were not always friendly.

  "You disappeared," Razor said. His voice was carefully neutral. "After the Ghost Train. I woke up in the Hub. You were gone. The Express was gone. I heard rumors—an EX-rank clear at the Blood-Moon Carnival. A Consortium facility destroyed. Then nothing."

  "I was in a 5-Star zone. The Ashen Penitentiary." David stood at a conversational distance—close enough to be heard, far enough to not trigger a combat reflex. "I’m back now, and I need your help."

  Razor studied David’s face. Whatever he saw there—the new quality in the eyes, the way David’s coat sat differently on shoulders that had been rebuilt twice by system rewards, the blue Warden designation that Razor couldn’t see but might have sensed as a change in David’s ambient authority—made him remove his hand from his belt.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  "I owe you," Razor said simply. "The beef jerky on the train. The warning about Car 13. You could have left me in that cabin, and you didn’t." He crossed his arms. "What do you need?"

  "A team. I’m going to the Beta-Tier gateway—the Consortium’s dimensional bridge. There’s an S-plus ranked Cleaner stationed there, and I need people who can survive proximity to a fight at that level while I access the bridge’s architecture."

  "Survive proximity. Not fight."

  "You can’t fight a Cleaner. I can’t fight a Cleaner. Nobody in the Alpha server can fight a Cleaner in direct combat. But I don’t need to kill it. I need to get past it, reach the bridge’s control interface, and have enough time to read the design documents before the Cleaner kills me."

  "How much time?"

  "Unknown. Minutes, probably. Maybe less."

  Razor was quiet. His fingers traced one of the newer scars on his forearm—an unconscious gesture, the way some people rubbed a lucky charm.

  "The Drowned Parish," Razor said. "Four-star. Underwater dungeon. I cleared it with a team of six. Three of them died in the first hour. The other two died in the boss fight. I survived because I’m good at not dying. That’s my skill. Not fighting, not hacking, not analyzing. I stay alive when things around me stop being alive."

  "That’s exactly the skill I need."

  "You need a tank."

  "I need a survivor who can draw attention, absorb pressure, and keep moving when the situation degrades past the point where combat training matters."

  Razor almost smiled. It was the first expression David had seen on his face that wasn’t calibrated for threat assessment.

  "You’re asking me to be a decoy."

  "I’m asking you to be what you’re best at—the last man standing in a room where everyone else is dead. The Cleaner will target the biggest threat first. That’s me. When it does, I need you to be somewhere else, doing something useful, surviving."

  "What’s the useful thing?"

  "I’ll tell you on the train." David extended his hand. "Are you in?"

  Razor looked at the hand. Then at the weapons stall, with its gauntlets and its runes and its promise of incremental power growth through the system’s sanctioned progression path. The safe route. The intended path. The one where you climbed the dungeon ladder one star at a time and pretended the ceiling at 10-Star was the end of the universe.

  He took David’s hand.

  "I was getting bored of shopping anyway."