Standing guard right by the door connecting to the next carriage, a girl stood tall a solitary sentinel amidst a dead land.
She wore a long, dust-colored trench coat over a white silk shirt, neatly fastened with a small necktie a rare touch of elegance remaining among this heap of rusting scrap metal. Her tall leather boots planted firmly on the metallic floor, while an old mechanical camera with a tarnished brass casing hung at her hip like a heavy-duty weapon.
Beneath her golden hair, swept up into a tidy bun, her face radiated a hardened resolve, framed by sharp, thin eyebrows. Her eyes narrowed, scanning Ren's group with cold analysis, devoid of even a flicker of fear or relief. Her hands moved tirelessly, scribbling into a small notebook; the steady scratching of her nib on paper echoed through the hiss of steam. She nudged the bridge of her glasses and dropped a greeting as sharp as a sensational headline:
"Finally, someone left alive to interview. I'm Karin, war correspondent. Don't just stand there gaping."
"If you're going to ask me why the passengers vanished, the answer is simple: everything began the moment that tyrant appeared." Karin raised her camera, pointing toward the fog-shrouded windowpane. "I caught a glimpse of something clinging to the outside of the hull before we came to a full stop. It wasn't human, and it wasn't a machine. If Anabelle doesn't fix this train soon, we'll be the cover story for hell's daily Gazette."
While Karin continued to grip her notebook with a steely expression, a tinkling giggle clear yet laced with mockery drifted from the darkest passenger bench.
Marina stepped out, her beauty like a poisonous flower blooming amidst the rusted iron. She was dressed in a jet-black Gothic gown, adorned with intricate lace at the cuffs and hem, a stark contrast to Karin's utilitarian austerity. Her deep purple hair was intentionally disheveled, cascading down to obscure part of a delicate face that was as pale as a corpse.
Marina's lips, painted in a plum-colored stain, curled into a reckless smile. Her long, slender fingers, laden with silver rings engraved with occult symbols, slowly twirled a small piece of red chalk.
"Oh, little miss journalist, are you still clinging to that 'truth' of yours the kind you can only see and hear?" Marina glanced at Karin before shifting her gaze to Ren. Her pale violet pupils seemed to pierce through flesh to touch his very soul. "Are you so bitter toward the Crimson King simply because he won't fit into your camera frame? Or are you afraid that blood-soaked crown will incinerate your useless newspapers?"
Karin gripped her notebook so tightly the pages began to curl. Blue veins pulsed against her pale skin. Her golden eyes weren't just filled with rage; they sharpened, focusing as if locking onto a truth she had pursued for far too long.
"He is not a king," Karin's voice rang out, each word measured and precise, like a lead sentence ready for the front page. "He is an anomaly wearing the guise of royalty."
She took a small step forward, her eyes never wavering from the empty space before her, as if presenting to an invisible auditorium.
"The war between the Western Union and Bremen was no historical accident. It had a beginning. It had an escalation. It had systemic decisions." A brief pause. "And at the epicenter of that entire chain... is the Crimson King."
Her voice dropped an octave, but its power did not wane.
"Millions of dead are not a statistic. They are a traceable consequence. Obliterated cities are not 'collateral damage.' They are the result of a massacre born of violent, autocratic policy." Karin squeezed the notebook harder, as if holding the sum of all facts in her palms. "And wherever he appears Prehevil being no exception the same pattern follows: instability, escalation, and then collapse."
She tilted her head ever so slightly. Her camera thudded against her hip as she let go, a dry, final sound like the period at the end of a completed essay.
In total defiance of that heat, Marina remained perched on the edge of a table. Her legs, clad in black stockings, swung rhythmically, slowly... almost carelessly. She didn't look at Karin. She didn't look at anyone. The existence of the debate seemed to brush past her like a breeze not worth catching.
Her dark purple eyes downcast. Her slender fingers drifted over the surface of an ancient silver ring. The tiny red chalk made contact, tracing crooked lines that formed minute, distorted occult characters looking very much like half-closed eyes.
"War. Unions. Atrocities..."
Marina's voice rose, thin and light, like a wisp of smoke that began to dissipate the moment it formed.
"You do love to cram the world into such convenient concepts, don't you, Karin?"
She tilted her head slightly, yet her eyes remained fixed on the ring.
"To you... he is the cause." A beat. "To me... he is merely a consequence."
The corners of Marina's mouth twitched upward. A tiny smile. Cold. And containing something... almost like pity.
"You seek accountability. You want a culprit." She blew gently on the ring; red dust swirled into a small halo around her fingertip. "But some things do not operate by that logic."
This time, she looked up. Her gaze shifted to Ren.
"Do you see?" Marina said, her voice steady but lower. "While our little journalist here is busy trying to arrange history into causes and effects..."
"...that 'King' has already moved a step ahead."
Her smile deepened a fraction.
"Not on the battlefield."
Her violet eyes reflected the dim, murky light.
"But in our dreams."
Karin scoffed, slamming her notebook shut with a sharp crack like a gavel. She crossed her arms, her piercing eyes fixed on the connecting door. "I am not afraid of him. I've seen what the armies of the three Allied nations did at the border. If he is the leader, I will be the first to record the moment he kneels before justice."
Hearing this, Marina let out a faint, haunting laugh that vanished into the mist. She held the silver ring, freshly inscribed, up to the train's dull light. The tiny red characters on it pulsed once, as if granted a fleeting spark of life.
Marina did not retreat. She only tilted her head, a lock of deep purple hair falling to shroud half of one eye, making her smile appear more distorted and inscrutable than ever.
"Memory is a cage, dear strangers. People lock themselves inside it to feel safe from the erosion of time," Marina whispered, her voice now like the sigh of wind through narrow stone crevices. "But here... it does not flow in a straight line. It coils back, biting its own tail like the Ouroboros. The 'Truth' that miss journalist worships is merely a dry scale shed by that serpent."
She stepped a bit closer to Ren close enough for him to catch the scent of dried roses fading beneath the pungent tang of rusted iron, the smell of decay meticulously concealed.
"Can you hear the call? The call of instinct... or perhaps something that must change to avoid eternal rot." Marina pressed her index finger to her lips, a haunting gesture for secrecy. "What is happening is not a war, but an 'arrangement.' The Crimson King is not invading this nation; he is reclaiming something that has belonged to him... many, many times over. And us? We are the discordant notes being forced to harmonize with his symphony."
Karin shifted her stance, her brow furrowing. Despite her profession forcing her barely past her twenties to interact with all manner of classes and creeds, and to decode the inexplicable, this was the first time she felt her patience fraying. She felt as though she were going mad. But then, the era she lived in was already mad.
"What nonsense are you spouting? He is a man, flesh and blood, the one who ordered the Allied forces to open fire on innocent Bremen civilians!"
"He was human once, Miss Karin," Marina glanced toward the next carriage door, where a faint crimson light flickered through the gap. "Now, he is a mirror. And what you see in him... is merely the reflection of this world's own sins."
"If it is an arrangement," Ren spoke up, his voice dropping so low it made Tanaka shudder nearby, "then where is the beginning, and where is the end?"
Marina fell silent for several seconds. She looked deep into Ren's eyes; for the first time, the mockery was gone, replaced by a touch of curiosity and something that looked like recognition.
"You will meet that person soon enough," she whispered, her hand with the silver ring trembling slightly. "But be careful... there are truths that, once known, will make you wish you were still just a discordant note in the crowd outside."
Marina moved into the next carriage and closed the door. Her departure did not look like a flight, but rather like a ghost who had finished her role as a messenger and dissolved into the void.
The door snapped shut with a dry thud, leaving behind a heavy silence where her words hung like dust motes in the air, clinging to the minds of everyone present.
Ren stared at the closed door, where the faint scent of dried roses and rusted iron still lingered. He could sense the exhaustion hidden behind Marina's nonchalance a soul-deep weariness from facing the very "arrangements" she had just described.