1:00 AM. The bell was small, silver, and cheerful in a way that nothing on this train had any business being. It chimed from the corridor with the cadence of a hotel breakfast service, accompanied by the squeak of rubber wheels on steel flooring.

  And the smell.

  The smell was a weapon. It bypassed the nostrils and struck the hypothalamus directly—a dense, layered aroma of roasted meat, caramelized fat, wood smoke, and spices that David’s olfactory system classified as "food" before his conscious mind could intervene. His salivary glands activated involuntarily. His stomach, which he’d fed well from the storage ring, clenched anyway, responding to the signal with a hunger that had nothing to do with caloric need.

  Rule 4: At 1:00 AM and 3:00 AM, the food cart attendant passes through the corridor. Do not buy food or water from the cart. Endure.

  David’s True Sight cut through the hallucinogenic layer: the "roasted meat" on the cart was charred human tissue. The "stew" contained floating eyeballs, their optic nerves trailing like noodles. The aroma wasn’t cooking—it was high-grade mental pollution, a chemical attack designed to override rational decision-making by hijacking the brain’s most primitive reward circuits.

  The cabin door opened. The attendant was female in shape, wearing a uniform that might have been elegant once. Her face was painted in makeup so thick it functioned as a mask—white foundation, red lipstick, drawn-on eyebrows positioned slightly too high, giving her an expression of permanent, deranged surprise. When she smiled, her teeth were needles.

  "Late-night refreshments, dear passengers. Freshly prepared. Won’t you try some?"

  Above David, the suited entity traded a blackened pocket watch for a dripping slab of "meat" and began eating immediately. No hesitation. Entities consuming entity food—a closed ecosystem, cannibalism as commerce.

  Razor was in trouble. David could hear it: the veteran’s breathing had changed, quickening into the shallow, rapid pattern of someone losing a fight against their own impulses. A day of starvation in the previous dungeon, plus the hours of terror on this train, had left his willpower reserves critically low. The pollution-aroma was the final load on an already failing structure.

  Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

  "I’ll... I need to buy..." Razor’s voice was thick, slurred, the words forming against his own will.

  "No." David’s voice cut through the cabin like a cold boot command. Not loud—the 40-decibel rule was always in the back of his mind—but carrying the specific, compressed authority of someone who was not making a suggestion. "You’re smelling a hallucination. The meat on that cart is human tissue. If you eat it, you’ll mutate before you finish chewing."

  The clinical precision of the description worked where a simple "don’t" would have failed. Razor’s survival instinct, presented with a concrete image of the threat rather than an abstract prohibition, snapped him back from the edge. He collapsed on his bunk, slapping his own face with both hands, hard enough to leave red marks.

  The attendant turned her needle-toothed smile toward David. She leaned close—close enough that he could see the texture of her makeup cracking along fault lines in the foundation, revealing something gray and dry underneath.

  "Aren’t you hungry, sir? It’s quite... delicious."

  David looked at her. Then he reached into his storage ring.

  What he produced wasn’t a steak this time. It was simpler, more pointed: a vacuum-sealed packet of premium beef jerky, a bottle of mineral water, and two protein bars. He tossed the jerky and a protein bar up to Razor’s bunk without looking.

  "Eat that instead," he said. Then he opened his own water bottle and took a slow, deliberate sip, maintaining eye contact with the attendant the entire time.

  The attendant’s smile didn’t change, but something behind it did. The needle-teeth retracted slightly. The painted eyebrows, already too high, climbed another millimeter. David was not just refusing her product—he was demonstrating that her product was unnecessary. That he had access to a supply chain that didn’t run through her.

  In commercial terms, he’d just shown a monopoly that it wasn’t one.

  "Take the cart," David said, "and leave."

  She left. The rubber wheels squeaked down the corridor, growing fainter, and the hallucinogenic aroma faded with them.

  From the upper bunk, the sound of Razor tearing into beef jerky with genuine, desperate gratitude. "Where... where did you get real food in this place?"

  "I came prepared," David said. "Lesson one of survival computing: always cache your dependencies locally. Never rely on the server to feed you."

  Razor chewed in confused silence. Above them, the suited entity had stopped eating its purchased meat. It was staring at the protein bar wrapper that had fallen from Razor’s bunk, its eyeless sockets radiating something that, on a human face, would have been called envy.