Infinite Train
Chapter 673: Executioner
“Let’s go.”
Dropping these two short words, Hugo walked straight towards the train parked not far away.
“C-coming!” Anise was stunned for a moment, then immediately followed.
The two walked briskly towards the train one after the other.
Even though several corpses lay across the tracks ahead, it didn’t seem to affect the machine’s operation. The train roared on the tracks, emitting billowing white steam from above. The boarding doors were all on Hugo and Anise’s side. Since it hadn’t officially arrived at a station, all the doors remained tightly locked, showing no signs of opening.
“Step back,” Hugo said, biting his cigarette.
Anise hurriedly took a few steps back to avoid being caught in the crossfire.
Pale grayish-white smoke drilled into the cracks of the train’s iron doors, twisting into thin, resilient threads. In the blink of an eye, they possessed the terrifying strength of steel rebar.
Crack, cr-crack—
Amidst the teeth-grinding metallic reverberations, the train doors began to deform and twist.
Red light flickered in Hugo’s eyes. As ashes fell, in the next second, the volume of the smoke in front of him suddenly expanded!
Bang!!
The train’s iron doors were actually torn off just like that. Under the invisible, massive force, they flew far away and smashed heavily onto the ground with a loud clang.
Anise turned sideways to look at the doors several meters behind him—their edges were deeply dented, completely twisted and deformed, their original shape unrecognizable. Even though this wasn’t the first time he had witnessed the terrifying nature of Hugo’s abilities, he still couldn’t help but click his tongue in marvel.
“Badass.”
The higher the intensity, the deeper the mutation.
Even though Hugo looked completely fine on the outside right now, judging solely by his innate ability… his degree of mutation had probably long approached the top three.
“Truly worthy of being a top-tier Executioner. You really have the Nightmare’s deep favoritism,” Anise clicked his tongue. “The degree of enhancement it gave me probably isn’t even one-tenth of yours, is it?”
Hugo acted as if he hadn’t heard Anise’s passive-aggressive praise. He merely lowered his head to scrutinize the door frame on the train—although the doors had been completely torn off, irregular contours were rapidly growing from the steel edges, as if the train were trying to grow a new door.
The level of this train was very high, and the internal situation was unknown; the time given to them wasn’t too abundant.
Hugo prepared to board the train: “Wait here.”
If the only entrance and exit were left unguarded, Pinocchio would very likely seize the opportunity to escape while they searched the other carriages. Once he reached this open area, it would be difficult to find him again.
“Wait a minute,” Anise stopped him.
Hugo paused his steps and turned his head to look.
“How about you stay here, and I’ll go up and search?”
Anise’s mouth twitched, revealing a fake smile.
The main reason for their failure last time was that the Pinocchio brat was too hard to catch. However, if Hugo hadn’t stopped him from making a move right at the beginning, they wouldn’t have ended up in such a sorry state now.
“Of course, I don’t mean to question your abilities or attitude,” Anise’s attitude seemed terrified and respectful, but it actually harbored malicious intent. “It’s just that there’s some history between you two after all… Aren’t I also thinking of you? At the very least, you can avoid witnessing some unnecessary bloody scenes, right?”
“…”
Hugo stood in place, his gaze flickering coldly.
A few seconds later, he withdrew his step: “Be my guest.”
Anise boarded the train.
The train was very old, covered in rust spots everywhere. Shrouded in faint light, it looked exceptionally cold and terrifying.
He stomped his foot on the ground, revealing a thoughtful expression.
As the anchor who interacted with ghosts the most and whose innate talent had the strongest correlation with them, Anise felt a certain controlling power inside the vehicle almost the instant he stepped onto this train… This train seemed to cause the vengeful ghosts entering it to lose a portion of their power, forcing them to submit to its rules instead.
However, even though Anise’s degree of mutation was already quite high, he still retained some human characteristics. Therefore, the train’s “rules” merely made him feel somewhat uncomfortable at most, rather than causing him to sink completely into them.
More importantly, the moment he boarded the train, he could feel that the connection between him and the Nightmare was severed by some invisible force.
Anise walked straight into the carriage on the right. With a clatter, he pushed open the compartment door. The carriage that appeared before him was dead silent. On the red seats, several blurry human silhouettes had their backs to him, sitting motionless in their spots.
Even without looking closely, Anise knew that these “passengers” were not human, but vengeful ghosts.
He let go of the compartment door and walked forward step by step down the aisle.
The ghosts sitting in their seats turned their heads as he walked, seemingly activated by the scent of the living—clearly, with the train stopped, its originally existing internal rules were no longer as solid as before, becoming loose instead.
Anise walked toward the depths of the carriage without pausing his steps, seeming long accustomed to the “gazes” of ghosts.
What a pity. Although the Nightmare could tell them when and where to find Wen Jianyan, it couldn’t tell them exactly which part of the train Wen Jianyan was on. Even its hands had trouble reaching this far.
Because of this, Anise could only use the most primitive method, searching forward carriage by carriage.
Suddenly, his steps came to an abrupt halt.
On a window on the side away from the doors, the glass had been violently smashed. A large hole big enough for a person to pass through was broken open on it. Outside was the empty, dark wilderness.
And on the sharp edges of the glass, fresh human bloodstains remained.
“…”
Anise stared dead at that hole, his face instantly turning dark.
Outside the train.
“…What?” Hugo asked.
“That guy ran away!!” Anise’s teeth ground loudly, his pale face twisting slightly, looking as if he wished he could eat his flesh and sleep on his skin. “Fuck! That sinister, slippery bastard… He probably bolted the moment he saw the train stop!”
He even chose to break a window on the side far away from the doors, perfectly using the train’s body as cover to slip away.
His expression was furious, and he continued to curse non-stop:
“When I catch that brat, I’m going to peel off his skin, break every bone in his body, tear apart his—”
Anise’s remaining words were drowned out by the roar of the train.
Ahead, the corpses blocking the tracks could no longer resist the train’s forward momentum. Accompanied by several teeth-grinding cracks, the heavy wheels forcibly crushed those pale corpses beneath them, beginning to move forward slowly but resolutely.
The train was about to depart.
Anise jumped off the train: “Let’s go, we’ll chase him.”
His expression was still cold and gloomy, with a tyrannical light flashing in his eyes.
“There are no hiding places on this plain. That guy won’t be able to run far.”
Yes, there were no hiding places on this plain.
Wen Jianyan’s palm bled continuously. He gritted his teeth and wrapped the wound with the corner of his shirt. However, the fresh scent of human blood still attracted unwanted attention.
On the bright red seats sat several silhouetted black shadows. They slowly turned their heads—even though Wen Jianyan couldn’t see their faces clearly, he could feel that these passengers were “watching” him.
Wen Jianyan pressed his back tightly against the train’s steel wall, cold sweat soaking his shirt.
Although it hadn’t reached a station, the train stopping in itself meant a weakening of its control over the vengeful ghosts in the carriages. He was currently no different from standing on the edge of a cliff; just a slight step forward would result in his body being smashed to pieces, doomed eternally.
But, he had to take a gamble.
In this area, space and time held no meaning. The train hadn’t reached a station, which meant he would have nowhere to hide. If he got off now, he could only run blindly forward on this endless wasteland like a headless fly. He was currently alone and helpless, unable to use his items, while his pursuers were not only worlds apart from him in actual combat strength, but also highly likely to have the Nightmare’s assistance.
Leaving the train… would be purely seeking his own death.
He heard the approaching footsteps from the rear carriage suddenly come to a sharp halt. Then, after a long, agonizing silence, they sounded again, quickly fading away along the path they came from.
“…”
Listening to the footsteps gradually fade, Wen Jianyan’s tense shoulders relaxed slightly. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
He won the gamble.
The other party’s understanding of this space and this train was far inferior to his—humans have an instinctive awe of the unknown, even the most veteran anchors. They worried that Wen Jianyan had truly left the train, and worried even more that he had left himself a way out; once they let him get away, they would never be able to catch up.
It could be said that Wen Jianyan was gambling, and the other side was gambling as well.
And the train could not be blocked for long, so they had to make a judgment before the train restarted.
Precisely because of this, Wen Jianyan had a chance of winning.
The vibration of the floor beneath his feet intensified. The neighs of operating machinery and colliding steel rang in his ears. The scenery outside the window began to slowly move backward…
The train had started.
Clack—
The door that Hugo had just violently torn off had been restored at some point. It slowly closed as the train moved, and the train body was once again tightly sealed.
It accelerated bit by bit. The corpses ahead wailed as they were pulled beneath the wheels, their pale faces squeezed and deformed between the tracks.
“…”
In the darkness, Hugo suddenly stopped walking, turning his head to look at the bizarre train slowly starting beside him, his expression unreadable.
“Hey!” Not far ahead, Anise stopped walking, his face full of impatience. “What are you waiting for?”
They weren’t sure when Pinocchio had left the train. If he had run the moment the train stopped, then the time gap between them wasn’t short. If they didn’t hurry, it was highly likely they’d really let that guy slip away again.
The train’s speed gradually increased, the wheels striking the tracks with a deafening sound.
Just before the train was about to sweep past him, Hugo abruptly moved.
He abruptly raised his hand, grabbed a protruding horizontal bar on the outside of the train, and leaped agilely, his whole body jumping on as the train started.
Anise was severely startled, his voice rising in astonishment, even drowning out the vibrating roar of the moving train:
“Hugo, what are you doing??! Are you crazy???”
Hugo turned his head. The fierce wind whipped up by the moving train made his clothes flap loudly, like a torn piece of dark cloud. His eyes were their usual iron-gray, and his tone sounded extremely calm amidst the noise:
“Get on quickly. That guy didn’t get off the train.”
In the sky above, that blood-soaked wound was still quietly looking down at the earth.
On the ground, the train traveled unimpeded towards the depths of the darkness.
Through the window, Wen Jianyan stared at that patch of sky, his face extremely solemn.
While deep in thought, he suddenly heard a strange vibrating sound coming from the roof of the train—
Wen Jianyan paused and subconsciously looked up.
The roof of the train was very dirty, as rust-mottled as the train body itself.
The rhythmic sound of the moving train filled his ears, masking all anomalies.
An auditory hallucination?
No, that’s not right.
Wen Jianyan’s pupils shrank.
Half a minute later, through the half-open carriage door, he heard a loud crack—accompanied by the sound of shattering glass, something smashed through the window and jumped directly in from outside the train!
The window that Wen Jianyan had just smashed, which hadn’t yet had time to restore itself, was now twisted and deformed. Howling cold wind poured in from the outside.
Hugo stood inside the messy carriage, lowering his head to brush the glass shards off his overcoat.
Behind him, Anise stumbled and supported himself on a seat to stand up. He looked much more disheveled than Hugo. His face, body, and hands were covered in bloody gashes scraped by the hurricane-force winds whipped up by the train. Dark blood flowed down drop by drop—in this area, even the wind was lethal.
Although Hugo used his innate talent to block a portion of it, it only ensured that Anise didn’t die. Whether he was injured or not was clearly not within his scope of consideration.
“Fuck… thankfully I remembered the location of this broken window, otherwise we would have both died out there!” Recalling what just happened, Anise still felt a lingering fear.
Invading from the outside and leaving from the inside subjected the train to two completely different levels of defensive strength. Because of this, it was incredibly strenuous for Hugo to get in, while Wen Jianyan only needed to break a window to leave. To the train, running and stopping followed the same logic.
While the train was moving, not even Hugo could invade here from the outside.
This window, broken from the inside, thus became their only entrance into the train.
“If Pinocchio that guy really got off the train, we’re screwed!” Anise gritted his teeth, his face slightly twisting in fear. “Who knows when this train will stop again. If we really missed this chance, do you know what the result will be?!”
Hugo didn’t answer. He just raised his head, quietly scanning the empty carriage.
Anise’s somewhat hysterical voice echoed in his ears.
Finally, Hugo withdrew his gaze, looked down at Anise from above, and said as if giving alms:
“Talk less, search more.”
Anise: “…”
Generally speaking, he rarely empathized with Orange Candy.
But at this very moment, he still found it hard not to agree with her evaluation of Hugo.
What an obnoxious, pretentious prick!!
Two carriages away.
Wen Jianyan stood in place, his eyes flickering slightly.
What a pity.
He originally thought that trick just now could shake off these two pursuers, but it seemed it didn’t work out. It was a good thing he felt the broken window was too cold and changed carriages in time; otherwise, he probably would have run straight into those two guys.
He twitched the corners of his mouth.
…This is going to be a bit troublesome now.
