"I think it's strong but not really rigid in the right way?"

"Not even if we stretch it really taut?"

"Between what and what?"

"These poles we hold onto...? I guess there wouldn't be a ton of space for us inside..."

"Yeah, if there were a third anchor point on one of the walls that might work but the poles are all in a line."

"This is a bizarre train. I guess it's an evil monster train, but still." Pause. "Your arrows? Can you tie string to your arrows and—maybe this is just wasting time and we should just keep stabbing them," he says, eyeing the frozen mass of salarymen just beyond the door with trepidation.

Haru tries stabbing an arrow into the train wall, but when he tugs on it with modest force it comes loose again.

"I'm out of ideas," he sighs. "Could use a grenade but it feels like overkill and it might fuck with the train itself."

"You didn't mention having grenades!"

"—oh. I have grenades. And other types of gun than just handguns but I have no idea how to use a sniper rifle."

"Do you have any idea how to use a grenade?"

"Hold the trigger, pull the pin, keep holding the trigger until you want it to actually go boom, then release the trigger and wait a few seconds."

"Okay, but like - how far away from them do we need to be when they go off?"

"The lethal radius of the ones I got is about five metres and the injury radius is fifteen, unobstructed." He grabbed the handguns and the grenades thinking to actually use them, the other guns were all just-in-case.

"Okay. One bowstring if I'm not playing it out further is about a meter and a half."

"...you think I should try it?"

"No, just trying to concretize how far that is."

The train comes to another stop. Salarymen start shoving their way in, and beyond them is a dragon made of sheets of paper, white with black stripes from the dense text crawling over its pages.

"End of the line," says Haru.

Alright, they should try to fight it for real, then?

Yup.

Time to learn by doing how to shoot guns sidereal, then.

Haru moves around a lot, which turns out to be important because the dragon exhales staples with astonishing force. He does the platformer thing, and fills it with lots of arrows, three at a time - he tries four but it's too hard to make sure the fourth one doesn't just wind up in the ceiling or floor and slows him down on net.

Yutaka can pause time to dodge if necessary, and might take some moments then to check the dragon for obvious weaknesses. And also, since it's on his mind, for the possibilty of getting the dragon to eat a grenade. It's, like, a trope, and all.

He can get the dragon to eat a grenade. This does seem to bother it, but it doesn't go down till there's a few more holes in it than that.

Pop! Goes The Hamster Dragon... And Other Fun Microwave Grenade Games.

And there's a seed, though Haru still has the one from last time to top off with since they didn't use it up.