The tracks hum under my boots even though no trains run this line anymore.
Old Metro Line 7. Dead line. Official story: structural issues, too expensive to fix. Unofficial story: screaming in the tunnels, workers quitting mid-shift, one guy walking onto the tracks and not coming back up.
That's why I'm here instead of asleep.
The station smells like wet dust and old piss. One flickering row of emergency lights throws sick, greenish patches across the platform. Rat droppings, empty beer cans, a rusted shopping cart on its side. The kind of place normal people avoid even during the day. Good survival instinct. Shame it doesn't extend to dispatchers.
I adjust my grip on the lamp in my left hand and the knife in my right. The lamp's not standard issue. I glued a UV strip to the casing last month. Looks like junk. Sometimes junk keeps you alive.
Contract details scroll in my head, because that's what you do when the dark gets too quiet.
Guild app. Code: E-12 "Whispers on Line 7". Type: Investigate Anomaly → Cleanse Location if necessary. Client: Metro maintenance, through a Guild front company. Witness notes: cold patches, distant weeping, phantom train sounds on dead rails. Reward: low money, low rank credit. Hidden risk: "Possible ghost-type entity, recommend junior hunter with exorcism basics."
That'd be me. Kade. E-rank. No exorcism basics unless you count swearing and running.
The air cools as I step off the stairs and onto the platform. Not "oh, it's underground" cool. Sudden breath-on-the-neck cool. My skin tightens under my jacket.
Good sign. Bad sign. Depends who you ask.
I click the radio at my shoulder, just to break the silence.
"Line 7 entry point clear," I say. My voice bounces back from the tunnel mouth, a flat, dull echo.
No one answers. There's no one on the other end. I'm not connected to a control room, just to a cheap recorder in my pocket. Habit. If I die, someone might find the tape and at least know what not to do next time.
I sweep the lamp across the tracks. The beam cuts through dust motes and hits the far wall. Graffiti. Tags. A smeared drawing of a train with teeth.
I check the time on my phone. 02:34. Perfect hour for bad decisions.
All right. Contract recap done. Now work.
The main tunnel drops off into darkness on both ends. I start to the left, keeping a meter from the edge of the platform. Enough room to jump down if something comes straight at me, close enough to move fast.
Loose wires hang from the ceiling in bundles. Some still have plastic casing, some show bare copper. If power ever comes back on in here, this place becomes a toaster oven.
My breath fogs in front of me.
I stop.
It's not that cold.
I exhale again deliberately. No fog. I step forward three paces. Exhale. Thin mist.
Cold spot. Classic.
"Okay," I murmur. "You're home."
Tunnel Wraith. Not in the app description, but the maintenance note mentioned "shapes in the rail reflections" and "someone crying from inside the wall." Cross that with old tracks and sudden temperature drops, and you get one thing.
Ghost-type, tunnel-bound, hates light. Likes sound. Uses it to move, sometimes.
I kneel and press two fingers to the concrete. The skin on my hand prickles like it's falling asleep. Pins and needles, but colder.
I crack open the small tin on my belt and pinch out a line of salt across the platform, boot scuffing to make sure it spreads evenly. My knife stays loose in my right hand. Metal's not great against ghosts, but something always ends up physical when they get angry.
The emergency lights overhead buzz louder. One pops and dies, glass tinkling onto the platform behind me. The rest flicker faster, stuttering between dark and sickly green.
"Screwing with the lights," I say. "So original."
The tunnel answers with a low, distant sob.
Female, maybe. Hard to tell. The sound stretches and thins as it comes, like someone dragging a finger along a piano wire. It vibrates in my teeth.
I stay still. Wraiths hunt by attention. You chase the sound, you give it what it wants.
The radio on my shoulder crackles.
"…Kade…"
My name, pulled apart by static, whispered through cheap plastic. My thumb flips the volume down on instinct. The voice keeps going, unaffected.
"…down… here…"
Good mimicry. Wrong cadence. No human talks like they're underwater and trying not to open their mouth.
I don't answer. I move instead.
Three steps back from the cold patch. Right boot brushes the salt line. Good. Between me and it. I slide my hand to the pouch at my hip and thumb open the lighter there. Cheap gas station mini. Flame's enough.
The sobbing cuts off.
Silence rolls in, thick as smog. Even the buzzing lights hold their breath.
Then the metal rails scream.
It comes as a shriek of tortured steel, racing along the tunnel like a train that isn't there. My skull rings. The emergency lights strobe white-green-black-white-green, faster than my eyes can blink.
The lamp in my hand flickers too. The UV strip sputters. That's new.
"Alright," I say through my teeth. "You touch the lamp, we're not friends."
Something moves in the tunnel. Not movement like a body. Movement like smoke in reverse, shadows peeling off the walls and sucking inward, forming a thinner black than the surrounding dark.
Tunnel Wraith. Half-there silhouette hanging a meter above the rails, stretched long like it's being pulled by momentum that never stops. No face, just a blown-out hole where the idea of a face should be. Light bends around it and loses.
The air temperature drops hard. Frost fingers creep along the rails.
I take two quick steps sideways, angling so the salt line sits between me and the thing.
"E-12 anomaly confirmed," I say, more to the recorder than the ghost. "Tunnel Wraith. Single instance. No visible anchors yet."
The Wraith drifts closer. It doesn't move its limbs. It just slides forward, robes or rags or whatever that black texture is dragging behind it like smoke caught in slow motion.
When it hits the cold patch, it flares.
Not visually. The temperature spike hits like opening a freezer with your head inside. My lungs seize for half a second. The lamp in my hand dies completely, UV strip and all.
The only light left is the dying emergency row.
They flicker once.
Then everything goes out.
For a heartbeat I'm blind. No platform. No rails. No ghost.
Just the ringing echo of that steel scream dying somewhere in the dark.
Then my phone lights my pocket on its own.
The screen shines through the fabric, too bright, wrong color. Not the usual white-blue. This is pale, almost gray. Dead light.
I don't take it out. That's how horror stories start.
The phone vibrates against my thigh. Once long buzz. Then again. Then again, building into a stuttering pattern like a heartbeat with arrhythmia.
The dark in front of me thickens. I can feel the Wraith there now, like a pressure front before a storm.
My tactical options are simple and not great.
Step one: restore light. Ghost hates it.Step two: locate anchor—usually a sound source, piece of old track, dead worker's helmet, something.Step three: break it or bait it onto the third rail and pray there's still power somewhere.
I keep the knife up and let go of the dead lamp. It hits the concrete with a dull clack I can't hear. Sound dies a centimeter from my ears, swallowed.
The air tastes like copper and freezer burn.
Fine. Plan B.
I yank the phone out.
The screen isn't my lock screen. It's… something else.
Dark background. Pale gray text, sharp and clean.
[UNAUTHORIZED ENVIRONMENT DETECTED]
My thumb brushes the glass. The text smears sideways, glitches, then snaps into new lines.
[SUBJECT: KADE][STATUS: UNREGISTERED HUNTER NODE][INITIALIZING HUNTER SYSTEM . . .]
My first thought isn't "What the hell." It's, "I don't have time for this."
The Wraith surges.
It comes in on the next pulse of cold, a wall of black tearing across the platform. I feel it before I see it: pressure on my chest, fingers of ice reaching for my ribs. I jump sideways, more on instinct than sight.
Something brushes my left arm. Numbness follows, then pins and needles. Feels like it's reaching into the nerves, trying to unzip them.
I hit the ground hard, shoulder first. Knife skitters away. Great.
The salt line saves my life. The Wraith slams into it, invisible weight hitting invisible barrier. The air cracks. Frost explodes up from the concrete along the line, a sharp rim of ice. The Wraith's shape flares, half-visible, fighting to push through.
The phone vibrates again.
Text overwrites text too fast to read, a cascade of symbols. For a second I see a burst of raw garbage:
Then it stabilizes.
[THREAT: TUNNEL WRAITH (E-RANK)][TYPE: GHOST/BOUND][HABITAT: ABANDONED TUNNELS / DEAD INFRASTRUCTURE][WEAKNESS: HIGH-INTENSITY LIGHT / ELECTRICAL DISCHARGE]
[HINT: UTILIZE AVAILABLE CITY POWER LINES.]
I stare for half a second too long.
"City power lines," I mutter. "Cute."
The Wraith pushes harder. The salt hisses, edges burning away into gray vapor. The barrier won't hold long.
Available power. Old metro. Supposedly dead line.
But they never really kill everything. Too expensive. They reroute, not remove.
I roll onto my back, teeth chattering from the cold, and squint toward the far wall. Emergency lights are dead, but I know the layout from the contract map. Junction box halfway down the platform, near the maintenance door. Most likely still wired.
"Alright," I say. "Let's gamble."
I shove the phone into my jacket, grab the knife with my numb hand, and crawl along the edge of the platform, staying just out of the Wraith's reach. It scrapes along the salt line, probing, pressing. Each time it hits, a wave of cold slams into my back.
The junction box is a gray rectangle on the wall, half-buried in grime. Two fat cables run from it up into the ceiling.
I flip the knife in my hand and jam the steel into the side seam of the box. Metal hits metal. Sparks spit, weak and sickly yellow.
Nothing else.
"Come on," I growl. "You cheap undead bastard of a system."
The phone pulses in my pocket.
[OVERRIDE AVAILABLE][ROUTE RESIDUAL CURRENT → TARGET ZONE?][Y/N]
I don't ask questions. I jab my thumb against the screen through the fabric. The phone doesn't need direct contact. It knows.
The whole station shudders.
Every emergency bulb flares to life at once. Not green this time. White. Harsh as a welding arc. The air hums. The hairs on my arms stand up.
The Wraith screams.
It doesn't sound like steel now. It sounds like rust peeling off a bridge and trying to take the river with it. Its form boils, black smoke thrashing away from the salt line. It recoils toward the tracks on instinct.
The rails glow a dull orange. Then brighter.
There is still power in this corpse of a line. Enough for one last jolt.
The Wraith drops onto the rails like someone cut its strings. The instant it touches metal, the light surges through it. The tunnel fills with a jagged corona, electric teeth biting through fog.
For a moment I can see the shape inside the ghost. A worker's body, maybe. Hard hat. Broken neck. Mouth open around a scream that never finished.
Then it all goes white.
When my vision comes back, I'm on my ass against the wall. My jacket smokes faintly. My left hand has no feeling from the elbow down.
The tunnel is quiet.
Emergency lights settle into a steady, cold glow. Frost melts on the rails, water running in thin lines along the metal. No more sobbing. No more pressure.
Just the distant drip of water and my own breathing.
I push myself up, joints complaining, and check the tracks.
The Wraith is gone. No shadow, no smoke, no bound soul. Just scorched patterns on the metal where the arc hit.
The phone vibrates again, calmer this time. I take it out.
New interface. Minimalist. Gray and white.
[HUNTER SYSTEM v1.0 INITIALIZED][USER: KADE][RANK: E][LEVEL: 1][HP: 74%] [STAMINA: 61%][CORRUPTION: —]
Below that, smaller lines.
[CONTRACT E-12 "WHISPERS ON LINE 7" – STATUS: CLEARED][REWARD: +100 XP, +STANDARD BOUNTY (CREDITS PENDING GUILD TRANSFER)][EXTRA: LOOT DROP]
Something clinks near my boot.
I look down.
A small cartridge lies on the concrete, no bigger than my thumb. Matte black casing, faint purple sheen along the seam. I didn't have that in my kit.
I pick it up carefully.
[ITEM: BLACKLIGHT CARTRIDGE][TYPE: AMMO][EFFECT: BURNS PARASITES / INVISIBLE ENTITIES][RARITY: RARE]
Handy. And definitely not Guild tech. They'd charge triple and stamp their logo on it.
"Right," I say to the empty station. "So now my phone hallucinated a HUD and dropped me ammo."
The System text hangs there, waiting. No tutorial. No explanation. Just a blinking cursor at the bottom, like it expects a response.
I don't give it one. Not yet.
Work first.
I do a slow sweep of the platform, lamp restored from my belt backup. No more cold spots. No more weird echoes. The track area smells like burnt ozone and old stone.
All signs point to "banished" rather than "postponed."
I snap a quick photo of the rails and the junction box for the Guild report. They'll complain about the power hijack later. They always do.
I'm heading back toward the stairs when something catches my eye on the far wall.
Fresh marks.
Not graffiti, not the usual spray tags. This is scratched into the concrete itself, low to the ground where the damp creeps up. Lines cut deep and clean, like someone used a chisel or a very determined knife.
At first it looks like random grooves. Then my brain lines them up.
A circle. Inside it, three vertical slashes, not parallel—slightly curved, like roots reaching down. Around the circle, smaller marks, tight and precise, almost like letters but not in any alphabet I know.
The concrete around the symbol is bone dry. No condensation. No dust. Everything else in the station has a thin film of grime. This patch looks… recent.
The phone in my hand buzzes hard enough to sting.
[UNREGISTERED GLYPH DETECTED][SCANNING . . .]
Text glitches. Squares. Static.
[ERROR][INSUFFICIENT PERMISSION][ADVISORY: LEAVE AREA]
For the first time tonight, something like a chill that isn't the Wraith runs down my spine.
The symbol hangs there on the wall, black cuts in gray stone, lines too sharp, too deliberate.
This is supposed to be a crap E-rank ghost cleanup on a dead line.
So why does the fresh mark that shouldn't exist here feel like it's watching me back?